2019 #11 Retro Colour Palettes: Paper Dolls with Lynne Perrella Collection {by Helen Chilton}

2019 Topic 11: Retro Colour Palettes

These stamps by Lynne Perrella are great fun, and Helen has turned one into several with bespoke clothing! This could be a fun holiday activity for any budding school age crafter, or even older ones! ~ Leandra

Hi everyone, it's Helen with you today, and I'd like to share with you my retro colours project. I decided on a retro toy to go with my 50's colour scheme. I remember Jo making one of these for a post a while ago but these new Lynne Perrella stamps lend themselves perfectly for this so I'm giving it another go. I've also added another type of doll to the collection.

The hardest part of all was choosing the colour palette! If you put 'retro colours' into Google you get so many results you don't know where to start. All I knew was that I didn't fancy the 70's brown colour scheme as the wallpaper in my first flat was a large brown, orange and purple floral design - gave me nightmares! So I've picked what I hope is a sort of 50's diner colour palette

I just stamped the doll onto mountboard using an ATCoin to draw the base and make the stand.

She'll stand like this:

The clothes are stamped onto glossy card - note the different necklines to add variety.  I coloured these with Distress markers which is very quick and easy. However when I tried to colour the doll herself the same way, the mountboard was just too porous to allow for any blending so I used pencils instead.

Here are all the outfits embellished in different ways. I've added a few dotty areas as I felt that gave it a '50's' look - might be quite wrong there, but I liked it! The bow is made from the butterfly wings:

Once I'd started I was on a roll so decided to make a jointed doll. You need two stamped images for each doll:

Then you just cut out the pieces ...

... and join them together. At this point you can go on and add a string pull to make the legs and arm move, but I've always thought they look a bit peculiar so I left it at this.

You can have great fun posing them - they're really quite athletic (unlike me!)

My original plan was to create a different coloured outfit for each decade but I got so confused with all the colour palettes that I gave up on that idea! 

When you do stamp the image for the outfits it's worth drawing on the tags before you start cutting out as it's very easy to just cut them off. I've had a lot of fun making these - as usual there's a lot of detail in the Lynne Perrella stamps which makes them easy to embellish. Just think, you could make a whole dancing troupe of the jointed dolls - add some net skirts and the can-can comes to mind!

Helen

Blog: A Splash of Colour