I’m so happy to tell you that the first Dragetarr ball jointed dragon doll will be available to purchase this autumn. The development of the doll has taken nearly a year. It’s wonderful to see this project finally reach its final stages. To be honest, I’m so enchanted by the design. I hope you like it too ♡ This article will cover how this project have progressed so far and what will happen next.
How did it all start
This project started with the tiniest of a hunch. I had an idea of a design, and I thought I’ll just quickly test if it would turn out well. I started with making a life-size drawing of the pieces. After that, my goal was to quickly throw together something that would somewhat resemble my drawing. This was seriously my attitude towards this doll. I just wanted to get this dragon out of my system, and I didn’t want to spend too much time on it.
I grabbed the cheapest clay I had. It was some sort of stone clay: heavy, and once it dried – quite brittle. I did enjoy the sculpting process, it was so low pressure, and no expectations. For my surprise I grew quite fond of this little dragon. I loved the design, balance of the body parts, everything seemed to be so nice. But right after I finished this ‘quick’ doll I realized, that I was already planning on how to improve the second version.
The material choise of the doll was really bad – too heavy and too brittle. There were also some problems with the posability of the doll, and balancing it for standing was a challenge. Which was actually quite big of a problem, as the pieces might and did break if the dragon would fall. So eventually I decided to make another, and improved version of this little one.
The second prototype of the dragon doll
I changed the clay for the second doll but anyway I kept using whatever I managed to find from home. I had some super lightweight clay (Fimo Air Light) and decided to go with that one. Quite fast I realized that this wasn’t such a good material choise either as the modelling process took me twise the time in comparison to the first material. I also noticed that after drying this clay would still dissolve in water. It was quite handy for making alterations to already dried pieces, but now as the doll is completed, I’m very afraid of exposing it to any humidity.
At the time when I was building these two, I was also experimenting with for me previously unfamiliar platform – TikTok. Video about making of this doll have (by today) reached incredible over 70 000 views. But better than that have been all the nice comments that this little dragon have received. It have been very wonderful but also a little overwhelming. People really seemed to like my little dragon and expressed their wish to buy one. Now there was such a big mass of people waiting to see what’s going to happen next, and the question was hovering in the air – will they be able to own their own dragon doll.
“People really seemed to like my little dragon and expressed their wish to buy one.”
After this second handmade doll was done I started looking for solutions of how could I make many of these in an affordable price. Making many of them by hand would probably be very tidious and tiring but also the end product would end up being very expensive for a buyer. This lead to the process of making a digital version of the doll. This process took a long time and I’m incredibly grateful for my love Cesar, who helped me by doing all the digital modelling work. Incredibly enough he had never done such work before but he learned using the program just to make my dreams come true. And the model is great! What a treasure I have ♡
What happens next?
We still have some work to do with finalizing the doll, but around these days we will finally have this little one ready to be shared with the world. I’m so excited and I can’t wait to tell you all about it! I hope you like this little dragon as much as I do, and it’s wonderful to see that all the work that we’ve done has really paid off. I hope I get to deliver you the good news as soon as possible.
The best of wishes from Finland
with love
Petra
