Hello.. thanks for checking this out.. this is my first try at a Doll Making tutorial. I hope it helps you make your own dolls, but of course I hope you still use mine! LOL
I am using an image shared on the net to create the doll in this tutorial. The file name says it is: b_m_Four_Seasons__Autumn_by_alexandriel.pspimage
Here is the file for you to use to follow along with my tutorial.. or you may tube your own person to "doll" from. The tubing part is not too hard, you just erase the background off the doll. However, if you Google Tube Tutorials.. you should find a pretty good one out there to help you prepare an image for you to Doll from. Now, on to the tutorial!
I am using PSP9 for this.. so hopefully you can follow along
You want to open your image and either doll heads of the two skin tones (caucasion & bethnic) or this sample of the skin tones below:
Below is a image of my open doll with the head erased off.
To accomplish this, you simply get your Eraser tool, set it on a comfortible size, I use around 20, with the settings as follows:
Shape: round Size: 20 Hardness: 100 Step: 25 Density: 100 Thickness: 100 Rotation: 0 Opacity: 75
With those set, simply erase the head from your doll so you have like the sample below
Next, we want to select all the skin showing on the doll. For this, we use the point-to-point tool with the settings in the below image:
With that set, use the tool to select all the skin in the neck area on the doll. You do not have to be perfect in making sure you have just the light skin and not the dark edging.. you will be shrinking this greatly, and it will not show much.. so if you are going to go over the line one way or the other, go over the darkness ;)
When you are done, you will have something like below:
Now, to select more than one area, hold down the Shift key to make more selections. We want to additionally select the hand since it is showing. Again, do your best, this is a first time, so you will perfect your technique as you make more dolls! Below is a sample of my selected doll hand. When you are done, you may let go of the Shift key ;)
With this done, you want to make a new raster layer with the default settings established. Once you have a second layer, duplicate the image. You can short-hand this by holding Shift and hitting the D key once. Below you see my two images with the two layers
Now, because you want the skin to match your heads, you now need your flood-fill tool set with one of the skin tines. You can flood-fill the selected areas with your skintone. You are going to say "it is flat, no defination of the attibutes!" Well, now you simply lower the opacity of the skin tone layer to about 76.. or whatever looks closest to the head skin, yet shows the details just a bit.. veiw image below
After you have done the skin tone matching, you want to merge the layers together, so go to your layer pallete and right-click, choose merge visable. You then go to your tool bar under Selections, and choose "Invert" to select everything else in the image except the skin. Tool bar image sample below
Once you have done that, your image looks like this:
Now, you can use your majic want selector tool.. holding the Ctrl key, click all the open areas around your doll. Once you have done that, your image will prolly have a few areas around the skin that are selected. Look Below:
You can use your point-to-point seleting tool and the Ctrl key to deselect those little areas.. Sample below:
Now, since you have done all this work on one doll, and you have the other skin tone to still do.. and in case you accidentally deselect the doll.. I suggest we save these selecction properties.
Go to your Selections tab on your tool bar, Go to Load/Save selection, and then click on Save Selection to Disk:
Here is where you can name the selection propeties as you want as I am doing in the preview image below:
With that out of the way.. lets make duplicates of the body we are working on. Now, you choose how many different color dresses you want to make.. you can do just 3, you can do 6, or you can do 13! I like to do the whole spectrum and a grey dress.. but this is up to you :)
Remember, Shift+D automatically makes a duplicate of the origional image
Now, once you have done that, you can start colorizing the dresses!
I use the colorize tool, there is another way to colorize, but for now, this works!
(I am using PSP9 remember)
On the tool bar, there is the tab Adjust, under that, you want Hue and Saturation.. under there is the Colorize tool. Seen Below:
With that, you can adjust the two numbers and play with it to see what color you want the dress to be.
Once you have got a dress to the color you want, you can hit Ctrl+D to deselect the doll. You now should have a body, no head, colored dress (or uncolored if you are making it with no color change) all on one layer with a transparent background. We are ready to resize to match the head.
You want to hit Shift+S to resize the image. In the Resize window, you want all these checked: Resize all layers, Lock aspect ratio and Resample using. There, in Resample Using, you want the option Smart Size.
Because all images are not the same size, you want to change the number in Pixel Dimensions in the top area of the window, to something like 20 or so. See how that looks, copy and paste as new layer the head to test and see if it fits. Play with it till you find what acctually fits like in the image below:
As you finnish dolls and color the outfits, you will want to copy and paste them to a new image so you can save them all as one file. Obviously, from here, you can do as you choose with your bodies. The image below shows my finnishing process.
I hope this helped you make dolls.. please do not be afraid to give me feedback on how well this worked for you so maybe I can edit it to be better for others.
I would also LOVE to see your results!(email address updated) My Email to Contact me
