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Cloth Doll Faces 
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It is the face, which gives your doll its individual character and therefore, requires some planning and care. Faces can be applied before stuffing and sewing and may look quite different from those applied after the doll is sewn & stuffed.

Since the face, alone, can communicate a doll’s personality, emotion, mood, age and gender, it is potentially the most difficult part to produce and not unsurprisingly, why so many novice cloth dollmakers fear creating faces for their dolls the most. Fear not, however, help is at hand!

Whoever said ‘practice makes perfect’ was undoubtedly speaking from experience, as things often seem scary before you tackle them, only to become second nature once you have mastered them. We can learn a great deal from the methods of portrait and make-up artists, since to create an acceptable looking face, we must combine prior knowledge with direct observation. 

Being a great artist is certainly not a pre-requisite for making effective doll faces. Knowing some basic rules is all that is required. As you become more confident drawing your own doll faces, almost certainly the type of face you produce will  be very different from someone else’s, reflecting your own individual style as influenced by the faces you see everyday, including your own facial features.

Teach yourself to NOTICE not just to look. Start a ‘face scrap book’ of magazine cut-outs look at the faces of the people around you including your own features.  
As you examine these faces you can begin to break down the proportions and elements of the features into a useful diagrammatic structure. 

The distance between the eyes, nose and mouth will make a significant difference to the appearance of the doll’s face. Small, close together eyes make a doll look older, whilst larger eyes are more childlike. Human foreheads are quite large and the level of the bridge of the nose and tops of ears is actually at the halfway point on the face.

A child's head is more rounded. The eyes and ears are lower down creating a high forehead. The eyes are also slightly further apart and larger. A child's eye brows are  at the mid line of the face.

Applying the face can be done by designing it first on a paper template and then transferring it to your doll. Some doll heads are sewn in sections resulting in a seam down the middle of the face and even a profile nose. Other dolls have a flat, forward looking face.

It is important to experiment by sketching out your designs onto a face template or you may prefer to pin pieces of felt, wool etc onto the stuffed doll for the eyes, brows etc. until you have achieved the desired result.

Common mistakes novice dollmakers make are in the assumption that the human eye shape is a symmetrical oval. In fact the human eye consists of three circular shapes (eyeball, Iris and pupil) over which the upper and lower lids rest. Also, unless a person is in shock or fear, the Iris and pupil of the eyes are not suspended in the middle of the eyeball, but are eclipsed by the upper eyelids, making the overall eye shape appear oval. The white highlight in the eye is on the same side for both eyes. (i.e. if you put it towards the left side of the left eye, you must also put it towards the left side of the right eye)  

Whilst asymmetry can produce some interesting results, symmetry of the facial features creates a pleasing effect. Symmetry can be achieved either by tacking temporary dividing lines onto the stuffed face before applying the features, or by transferring an already symmetrical pencil image from a paper template onto the doll’s face. 
A fade away marker with a fine nib can be used to outline the structure of the face and a mechanical pencil will produce a lighter, finer line than an ordinary one. 
Appliquéd fabrics and threads, embroidery, acrylic paints or fabric pencils, white gel pens and brown and black micron markers are all excellent ways to apply your own unique designs. 
I also like to use blush powders and eye makeup. And if all this seems too much, there are rubber stamp faces available.

Simple faces can be achieved by one of the techniques below or a combination of these. 

Embroidery
You don't have to be great at embroidery to create embroidered features. You can buy Anchor, DMC or Venus embroidery silks in a huge range of colours. They come in skeins containing 6 strands each. You can then use 2 strands together to sew in the doll's features. The threads are best sewn so that the loops are secured, preventing them from being caught or broken. This is a technique known as couching and is also used in Bangladeshi Embroidery, where lengths of thread are secured with tiny oversewn stitches.  

Couching          Straight Stitch      French Knot

Fabric Pencils, Pastels, Pens, Eye make-up
Whilst I use Berol Karismacolor pencils, there are other craft pencils on the market which apparently work just as well. Blend the cross-hatched cheek blush in a circular motion with an old fabric eraser. 
A fan brush is a useful tool for cleaning the surface afterwards. Blush powder is also very good and some people use artist's pastels crushed and applied like face powders with a brush. There are some excellent craft/artist colouring pencils available. Check to see if they are suitable for use on fabric.

Needle Sculpture 
A little like quilting, needle sculpture is a technique that involves stitching into the doll face to create raised 'sculptured' features, holding the stuffing in position to create shape and texture. See needle sculpting.  If you manage to prick yourself with the needle and get blood on your doll face, nothing moves it more effectively than saliva.

Moulded faces/skinning
Face masks made out of clay, hollow plastic and papier-mâché which are then covered with squares of stockinette or calico muslin stretched over the features and glued in position can create some realistic faces. See moulded faces

There is no substitute for just having a go yourself. Practice is invaluable and never a waste of time or materials. It shows you what works and what doesn't, what's hard and what's simple and what pleases you and what doesn't and gives you the all important experience and knowledge to go on to make more sophisticated creations of your own. Why not make lots of doll heads and create a series of pin dolls for practice!

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