𝒶 𝓋𝑒𝓇𝓎 𝒾𝓃𝒸𝑜𝓂𝓅𝓁𝑒𝓉𝑒 𝓁𝒾𝓈𝓉 𝑜𝒻 (𝒽𝑜𝓅𝑒𝒻𝓊𝓁𝓁𝓎) 𝒽𝑒𝓁𝓅𝒻𝓊𝓁 𝒹𝑜𝓁𝓁-𝓂𝒶𝓀𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝓉𝒾𝓅𝓈

ayzrules

NOTE: As the title suggests, this is a very, very in-complete list of tips to making dolls on this site. It is naturally limited in scope, because I am writing this at the internship I don't get paid for on 4 hours of sleep. So take that as you will lmao. If anyone else has tips, pointers, or useful collections, or anything else that u feel like people might find helpful, feel free to drop it in the comments on this blog and I will add it to the first post!

Dolls are, undoubtedly, one of the coolest things about URSTYLE/PV. But they're also a pain in the ass. The solution, then?

Like college term papers, which are also a pain in the fucking ass: you BS it.

The following is a list of how I bullshit my way through making dolls on this site. If you expected this to be Really Official and Very Technical, I am sorry. I am lazy and sleep deprived and just generally kind of a dumbass. This is how I do things

This is definitely not meant to be a comprehensive you-have-to-do-this sort of thing. But I've seen a lot of people talk about wanting to try to do more dolls, so I figure if anyone wants to read through it, might as well have it up? And I am by no means the final authority or the doll police or whatever. There are SO MANY awesome doll-makers on here who have so many different/diverse ways of doing things. This is just what I personally find the easiest, because again I am a lazy POS.

𝕋𝕀ℙ #𝟙: ℂ𝕆𝕍𝔼ℝ 𝕋ℍ𝕀ℕ𝔾𝕊 𝕌ℙ

Probably the most basic Rule of Bullshitting Dolls in the book. Does the skin tone of your doll's torso not match that of the face? Chances are, if they're close enough, slap a choker or a scarf or a necklace over the line and nobody notices a thing (I made this collection just for the purpose of having neck accessories on hand). You can also use hair to your advantage. Click the spoiler for examples of this rule in play

This is the final product? Looks Pretty Legit, right?

Here's what it looks like with all the extra hair I added to cover shit up removed:

And here it is without the choker necklace, which I 100% only added to cover up the skin tone change. But it still fits with the aesthetic I had going on for this doll, tbh, so like.....fuck the police?

Honestly, skin tone changes in general-cover that shit up. See spoiler below for what I mean

Aight, here's a set I made using a pic of Blanca Padilla, bc I adore her as a model and I love using her as a FC, but I digress

So the dress she's wearing-it was PERFECT for the character. Problem is, here's the original pic:

Yeah. The legs didn't match AT ALL. Blanca is, very decidedly, not that pale. So you know what my lazy ass did? Covered up that entire dress with grass and purple flowers.

Ooh, yeah. Flowers, especially, are very good for covering things up. Makes your set pretty + now nobody can see that her legs are actually white! It's a win-win

I have so many examples of this cover-stuff-up schtick; I swear, I do this shit on the daily. But to keep this from getting overwhelmingly long, I'll stop with these last two examples of how Covering Stuff Up is convenient. They demonstrate the principle of Being Lazy And Not Over-Complicating Things.

Okay, so here's a set I recently made. The doll on the left is behind the doll on the right.

This is why:

You think I was about to freaking make hands for this mans? No way Jose. First of all, the lighting in the pic I took his face from is wack AF, and finding a matching skin tone is already hard enough on its own. Then there's the fucking angle. Nah, boi. Better just cover that shit right up.

Okay, and here's the first set I ever made on URSTYLE:

Lmao, you think those arms would have ever worked without all that hair? Which, btw, I literally just cropped out of the original FC pic and cloned and resized a bunch of times? Hell no.

𝕋𝕀ℙ #𝟚: 𝕃𝔼𝔾𝕊? 𝕎ℍ𝔸𝕋 𝔸ℝ𝔼 𝕃𝔼𝔾𝕊?

If you've seen my profile, ever, like a good 70% of my dolls either are half dolls or have huge skirts. There's a reason for this. Namely that I am way too fucking lazy to deal with legs.

Like, sometimes the proportions are all wack. Sometimes it's the skin tone, or the angle, or a number of other stupid things. So why even bother?

When I don't do legs, I either 1) just skip the bottom half altogether, or 2) cover it up (see tip #1 for how much I love this damn strategy).

Okay, so we're going to skip talking about 2) just because it's pretty obvious. Big poofy skirt = lmao, why would u need legs anyway. See spoiler for examples + explanations of 1).

This doll is a perfect example of how sometimes, the legs are just WACK. In a way you don't know how to explain or fix. So, ofc, my lazy ass just decided that legs didn't matter

Here are the legs, in full. See what I mean?

The angle's....weird. The torso looks too small (a fact that is certainly not helped by Sara Grace Wallerstedt's unreasonably long & graceful neck. No, I am not jealous). So I made the tactical decision to cut the legs off before they even had a chance to look weird.

The doll above is a classic case of 'I have no idea what I'm going to do with the bottom half, so I'm just not going to do it'.

I mean, come on. For one, I had already done the hair EXTREMELY painstakingly, and I am so over how the items on this site shift, resize themselves, and are brought forward every time you crop it. So I wasn't boutta do anything about how square and how abruptly the jacket piece cut off.

This is another technique I'm fond of-the 'watercolor drip' instead of actually, you know, figuring out the mechanics of some fucking legs. Shoutout to vampy for uploading the items. This strategy is particularly useful for when the bottom half would look nice as something darker. In some cases, you might have to blend it with some shadows.

𝕋𝕀ℙ #𝟛: ℙℝ𝕆ℙ𝕆ℝ𝕋𝕀𝕆ℕ𝕊? 𝕐𝕀𝕂𝔼𝕊.

Idk about yall, but I am pretty shitty at proportions. I will endlessly resize things, trying to get them perfect, only to basically keep going around in circles. So a useful strategy: comparing your in-progress doll with the original pic

Below: on the left, a doll I had an extremely hard time perfecting the proportions for. On the right, the pieces I had to deal with. Proportions are especially hard when you're missing the arms and/or part of the torso, IMO

So to get the proportions right, I took the original pic of the dress, put it side by side with my doll, messed around with the size of the face for my doll and compared it to the size of the face for the OG pic. You can also take the OG pic, put it behind the doll, size the OG pic until it's about the same size as your doll, compare the proportions like that.

𝕋𝕀ℙ #𝟜: 𝕄𝔸𝕋ℂℍ𝕀ℕ𝔾 𝕊𝕂𝕀ℕ 𝕋𝕆ℕ𝔼𝕊

UGH, sometimes trying to get the skin-tones to match is the hardest thing ever. Sometimes it's the lighting, sometimes it's the fact that you don't have enough POC doll parts saved, whatever. Getting skin tones to match is hard, yall.

One strategy that seems p common sense but I'm going to say it anyway because fite me - picking the doll parts you think you'll use in advance, then tailoring which pics of your FC you clip for that doll to the skin tone of those parts. Trying to take care of the problem before it becomes a problem, so to speak.

But if that's just, not proving to be super useful, one thing you can do is clip pictures of your FC/model specifically for the other body parts. See spoiler for more info

I did this with a set I made with Anna Selezneva. The lighting + the natural tones of her complexion --> it was really fucking difficult to find legs that matched her face skin tone?

So I ended up googling her and trying to find pictures with her legs in them that would work with both the dress and the skin tone. This is what I came up with

The skin tones...are not a perfect match. Especially not if you're comparing upper half of the pic. But the lower half, with the legs? It still looks really wack, but it worked okay enough for the doll, given the spatial separation between face/feet

Also. This is a major bs'ing college paper mood, but. If your doll's face skin tone is much lighter than the hands/legs, consider: a veil.

w/o veil, kinda yikes. with veil, + gratuitous sand/dust effects sprinkled throughout?

you can't even see the face enough to tell the difference :^))))))). Some veils to get you started!

𝕋𝕀ℙ #𝟝: 𝕊ℍ𝔸𝔻𝕀ℕ𝔾 𝕀𝕊 𝕐𝕆𝕌ℝ 𝔽ℝ𝕀𝔼ℕ𝔻

Yeah, yeah, I know. Shading is a pain the fucking ass, especially when you've got like 100 items already thanks to 1) having no self-control, and 2) URSTYLE's complete lack of an item limit. Trust me, I don't like sitting clicking the 'backwards' button 70 times any more than anyone else does. But sometimes u gotta do what u gotta do

It also...helps a lot! Besides to keep your doll from blending into the background, you can use it for hair, to cover stuff up (lmao here we are again), to make weirdly shadow-less clothes look less weird, etc. Spoiler for deets

So my first example is the hair. This is the head of one of the dolls I've used as an example earlier

Here's what the hair looks like without all the extra shading I added. & I included all the shadows I could pull out of the hair in the pic, lol

& if you're still having a hard time making the hair match, I suggest taking your OG picture, cropping out little "pieces" of hair, and then layering/resizing/arranging them to fit, like so:

and shadows are always fair game when it comes to blurring/blending things together or covering them up, provided that the other items are also a dark color

Other useful places to put shadows include behind sleeves, on top of the wrist/hand part, behind skirts/shorts, on top of the corresponding leg part. Putting shadows where they naturally occur, if you're using doll clothes/cropping from pics that are in lighting that erases shadows, also helps to provide a sense of dimension. compare the OG pic:

with the final product. highlighted areas=where i added shading, either on top of or underneath the image of the shirt. in this example, i added a lot of shading in front of the shirt itself, because of how flat the original image is. sometimes, esp. with edited doll torsos with clothing on them, you could skip shading the clothing itself altogether and just focus on adding shadows behind the doll

IDK if it's redundant, but other places i usually shade = behind the head/hair, behind shoulders, behind arms/legs/hands as needed. Get yourself a good collection of shadows/blurs to have on hand. Here's mine if you want/need it

𝕋𝕀ℙ #𝟞: 𝕂𝔼𝔼ℙ 𝕋ℍ𝔼 ℍ𝔸𝕀ℝ𝕃𝕀ℕ𝔼𝕊, 𝕐𝕆.

For hair, my #1 biggest biggest biggest thing that I do practically 100% of the time is keep the hairline. What do I mean by this? Well, namely, when I crop my FC's face for the doll, I do this:

Instead of this.

Why? Because it is so much easier to bullshit a cool/realistic looking hairstyle with the hairline in place than it is to manually create a realistic-looking hairline. Below is a comparison - what I had originally cropped from the pic of Zhenya, and what ended up being in the final doll

Does that make sense? I built around the hairline and existing hairstyle, using some shadows to blend the doll hairpieces with the OG hair. If you wanna go for an updo, it's the same principle - keep the hairline, & build behind and around. The final product:

v.s. the deconstructed one:

When I cropped Kawani Prenter's face, I kept the hairline and a bit of the upper part of the hair, to make my life easier

𝕋𝕀ℙ #𝟟: 𝔽𝕀ℕ𝔻𝕀ℕ𝔾 𝕀𝕋𝔼𝕄𝕊

Shout-out to @spacelava for suggesting this section! You can find some of what she suggested about this topic here.

So ever since PV died, finding items for dolls has been especially hard. What I've done to make my own life easier is to like a bunch of things as I see them, and then use the item organizer feature to separate out doll parts into different collections. Y'all are welcome to mine, if you want them!
Lower Body Clothes | Legs/Feet | Upper Body Clothes | Torsos | Arms/Hands | Full Body | Hair

But if I need something else, something that I haven't already saved? I usually go to the 'art' tab in the editor. There are a lot of other item resources, ofc, but remember that I am lazy AF, and so this is usually my go-to option. If I can't find anything in the art tab, that's when I go stalk other people's dolls/items

URSTYLE has very conveniently given us these sections right in the editor! It's such a blessing, and one thing that they've certainly one-upped PV in. Now, I have absolutely no idea how one gets an item they uploaded into the sections, but. There's a lot, in there.

If you're searching for a specific thing - maybe a torso with a pink shirt? You can use this handy dandy color picker to pick which colors you want to include in your filtered search (it pops up when you hit the two squares at the top left of the tab), then hit 'apply':

If I spend some time looking through the various sections of the art tab & am still coming up with nothing, that's when I go stalk people's items. Here's a small list:

@vampirkaninchen has wonderful steampunk/neo-victorian/dandypunk doll torso/full body edits, as well as misc doll parts and hair
@Myrrael in general is just a blessing in terms of items
@necyluv as well. Her collections =
@majipoor: this collection, as well as this one for hair
@auntiehelen is the QUEEN of item collections. There are so many!!!!

ℂ𝕆ℕℂ𝕃𝕌𝕊𝕀𝕆ℕ

So if you've read all the way down, you are a real G and deserve a pat on the back. There's probably a lot that I missed, but. Such is life. If I think of it/someone asks for something, I can add it in

If you haven't, you are still a real one. TL;DR cover everything you have to up with hair/flowers/neck accessories, legs are never necessary, and it's easier if u don't crop out the hairlines

Finally - if any of yall have cool doll-making resources to share, @ me in the comments and I'll add it!

@aenir has a cool & slightly unconventional doll tutorial here!!

devilscult

thank you x1000!! you're literally the best I definitely learned some things from this!!!

emotions

ahlexandra

anotha suggestion: please take out where u call yourself a lazy POS because
O M G
you just blew my mind!!! ty so much for this truly the MVP
your dolls are so damn gorgeous and i can't believe your shading skills wow wow wow

ayzrules

@filthysoul yay!!! i hope at least 1 thing helped!!! you are so kind wtf!!!

ayzrules

@spacelava AHHHH I AM SO INCOMPETENT AND SOMEHOW DELETED YOUR POST

I have no idea what I hit!!! I am trying to figure out what I did & see if I can restore it, but in the meantime you are totally free to re-type parts of it if you feel up to it your links were so useful!!

I AM SO SORRY

ayzrules

@ahlexandra it's so true though????? i only have this list because i cba to, idk, figure out ways around making legs look good other than just not doing them??????

but thank you so much alex you're literally the best

DoreenMicheals

Holy cowbells you really like making dolls don't you hehehehe? I guess I am a hard core doll artist...love everything about the process from collecting to putting it allllllll together....I don't gather items while creating I use my collections only ...details that accent ...backrounds that create depth & tell a story …..skin can be tricky.. oh can we talk about "WONKEY body dimensions (I will make another tutorial like on Polyvore as well makes me nuts when skin doesn't match.... NOW HANDS & ARMS are my nemesis (hate them) Forget the mannequin types with trying to cut them out...gloves & hands behind the back is my "crutch" ANYBODY HAVE A TIP ????????? …...hand & arm cutting is even hard for me (legs are easier)….cutting & shadowing take practice don't over shadow....& don't be afraid to keep tweaking set. I go back all the time to improve my sets it's no big thing. I do a more custom cut type & have been doing it for over 5 years now.. I did some work shops on Poly starting with the basics...don't use too many tubes & mannequin parts BECAUSE there are so many great posed clothes. It takes a lot of work to put together a doll set ...well over an hour (I don't work so have time) I work on some for 2 days …& all I can say to everyone is dolls are like layer cakes each part takes time filling,frosting & all the deco flowers too wink Oh well enough said hahahahaaa have fun Doreen PS if anyone has a question I am happy to make tutorials & have started to do a little tutoring ….I am housebound & the interaction is really fun ...I have made some great friends around doll crafting ;)))))

emotions

@ayzrules lol i don't you hate it when that happens? no worries i can just paste it

since you're open to one, i just wanted to make a suggestion regarding the item use or better said how to find the right items. this for some reason was a lot easier during the good old poly times, but here where we literally had to start from scratch it's something that you, i and others find it to be super difficult.

so maybe talk about that a bit more? add links to the sites and people you usually save items from? here are a couple of examples to begin with:

Pinterest - preferably boards with titles such as PNG always have the best and most fashionable items when it comes to doll making.
Tumblr - sadly i can't provide a link because although i've heard that a lot of people use items from there i myself haven't so i can't really help with that particular one.

also i think it's very important to let people know that during the item raid it is strongly advised not to use the exact same items that you've saved from someone's set. otherwise that can no longer be called creativity, but blatant stealing

ayzrules

@spacelava thank you so much!!! u are the best and sorry again hahaha I'm really really incompetent

Fassionista

This is an incredibly well done tutorial. I will try some of your ideas. Thank you so much for this!