Fun with dolls

When I first took this photo for my website and other advertising needs I was pretty impressed with it. Having 11 dolls in the house, all at once, to take a group photo was pretty cool. Only 5 of them are dolls I use for my own show set-ups and the rest of them were either customer orders or random sales dolls. Being new to photographing so many dolls at once it took awhile to get a nice photo where the dolls didn't look like...dolls. It did finally work out though.

Recently I decided it was time to try to get some new photos. While I still like the old photo I don't want to use the same one over and over forever. So I called up my friend Joan Fauteux and asked if she could come over to play dolls and bring all of her " Field of Dolls" dolls. Joan has the largest number of my dolls in her personal collection. We thought she had 11 but when we counted again we found that she has 12 of them. That is amazing! So Joan brought her group, I took out my 7 (I have added a couple to my personal collection recently) and I had a few sales dolls here to play with as well. I think the new photo is very impressive! Not only is the larger group of dolls very impressive (to me anyway) but the "Travis" doll in front with his leader and side walker is really cute. Also having a bit more experience photographing dolls it didn't take nearly as long to set them up so they looked good. Joan and I are already working on planning another photo shoot with another friend that has several dolls that I made. It should be fun seeing what we come up with.

Recently there have been a couple of interesting dolls in the studio. There was this bendy cowboy and he was fun to make. Just like my group photo, this bendy guy wasn't the first bendy, bulldogger cowboy I have made. But he is new so needed some photos. Since I had the shoot set up I got a few quick ones to demonstrate some of his skills. He can ride...
He can also kneel for calf tying. He has another special skill which I will show you at the end of the post.

Another new doll is this showmanship gal. OK, what is so special about a showmanship doll? She is a new design and only her head is from a Breyer doll. I wanted to try something different recently so I offered a discount on a custom doll (or several...) if you had doll bodies to trade. I got some interesting new dolls in one of the deals. They are Obitsu dolls and I believe they are from Japan. The heads are totally unsuitable for the work I do (very large and out of scale) but the bodies are wonderful! They have good, tight joints and hold the position you put them in.
They have removable hands (which you can change to different hands if you really want to) so they are much easier to dress.
And they will hold any position you put them in. Including this very realistic run. I feel this really will be a great showmanship doll and she was fun to make. Fitting the Breyer head on the Obitsu neck stem was a bit of a challenge so she took longer than expected to make. But I get such a kick out of posing this doll that it was worth the extra work. I am working on a way to make all my future showmanship dolls able to "run" with a foot off the ground. I think it would be more realistic for set-ups with a moving horse. I will see what I can come up with and probably will post more here. For now this will be a truly one of a kind doll with amazing show ring potential.
And finally, I said I would share bendy cowboys other special skill at the end. When he was ordered I was asked to do a bulldogger but his "mom" didn't want him to be limited to that one event. He can of course ride a horse, kneel for the calf roping and of course, he can do bulldogging. Again, I didn't feel like digging out the cows to take an accurate photo. Showmanship gal is good at running but she wasn't quite fast enough ☺