Poet Art Dolls

Sometimes my blog may look like I forgot about stamping, cut and paste collage and other non-digital stuff, but rest assured that this isn´t true. For the whole month of December (while there were mainly digital pieces on my blog), I´ve been knitting socks for my sister, writing a hand-calligraphed and illustrated calendar for my mother and making paper dolls for my brother-in-law, for example.
Now that Christmas is over, I´m finally able to show you my Poet Art Dolls. As my brother-in-law likes Goethe, Thomas Mann, and Thomas Bernhard a lot (and as I´ve had great rubber stamps of their heads!), I´ve chosen those three for my dolls.

How have I done these? First I stamped the poets´ heads and cut them out. Then I stamped each and every stack of books that I found in my collection, plus a lot of suitable legs and arms that I all cut out. I´ve tried lots of combinations on black paper that I took photos of when they looked good to me in the end, just as a reference to come back to when it came to the final assembly, like Goethe and Mann here:

Then I coloured the different pieces and assembled them with glue and brads, making only some parts movable.

Before I wrapped them as a gift, I´ve made scans in jpg as well as png format so that I´ll be able to use these dolls in my cut and paste as well as digital collages over and over, even if I gave them away. 

And as this has been such a fun project, I´m not in the process of making more Poet Art Dolls for myself, and I´ve already found pieces for Hermann Hesse:

 and Edgar Allen Poe:

I´ll show you more once they´ve been finished!

(I´ve used stamps from lots of brands like Zettiology and Character Constructions for the arms and legs, and books from Darkroom Door, Stampendous, Tim Holtz, A Capella and others.)

Now what about you? You don´t have to make Poet dolls of course, with books as their bodies, but you can chose your own favourite theme and be creative when it comes to making the body - if you´ve been inspired by my dolls here, please show me your own results with a link in the comments below!