A Scale Test

I have a personal project that I want to work on. I’ve wanted to try making dolls. Especially something as poseable as a ball joint doll that will fit the scale of my 1:12 scale scenes and rooms. I got my hands on some Cernit Doll Clay from my clay vendor as soon as I found out she’d started carrying it. 

But the detail of doll faces is a lot of work. And not the same sculpting skills as I already have. So it is a bit intimidating and will require a few days in a row set aside to work on it. 

As such I’ve been toying with the idea of trying a less intimidating doll. Something with less realistic features. Something that will let me work the clay and learn how it works, practice some newer skills to myself, while not being so far out of my current skills as to cause stress. 

I find Animal Crossing extremely adorable. And the idea struck me that it might be fun to try making a player character doll. While still tossing around the idea in my head I had even found one of those online doll makers that used to work with flash to design a character that I would make. 

If you’d like to make your own, here is the doll maker I used. It's made by Ama.

Well this week I overworked myself. Not even with work work, but just daily chores and errands. I was forced to take time off. 

After I’d rested some, but before I could really start working again, this particular personal project came to mind. I’d have to draw up the scale and shape that I would want to do for such a doll. It would do me well to look at the scale in particular. 

So I opened up Inkscape as well as Pinterest. I found a good image of a human character from the current game and resized it.

The character I used is from Velouria of Moonbell on Tumblr.

This nice feature of Inkscape is that in the setting you can put a ruler up to the screen and change the scale of an on screen ruler to match so that you know that when you print something it will be the exact size you want it to be. 

I printed the image out in several heights so that I could compare it to my current roombox project. 

I started with 5 inches tall. For reference in 1:12 scale that would be 5 feet tall in real life. It looked absolutely ridiculous. The image was far too large for the room. I was pretty sure it was the head size that was making it look so silly and out of scale. So I laid the 5 inch test on my desk, pulled out a ruler, and measured her head. 

Turns out if an Animal Crossing character was 5 feet tall their head would be two & a quarter (2.25) feet wide. (not including the ears) 

That is huge. 

Luckily there were other heights to test. 

In fact for your amusement and mine, here are the images of each of the tests. 

1 or 2 inches seems like it might be the right size for me to work in. They would be small enough to look like a doll’s doll in the room. I might need to print out a 1.5 inch test to see how that looks. One inch looks like a small figurine in the room, but 2 inches looks like it would be easier to add fun details, so splitting the difference might give me a good mix. 

That‘s about where I stand on the project. I didn’t do a lot, but testing and research is an important facet of any new endeavor. And it didn’t put much strain on my body or mind.