Magnetic Paper Dolls

While I was in Rexburg, Idaho recently, I visited a store I am sure all paper crafters would love called Artco. They had tons of paper, cards, guest books, matchbooks, and other items for sale at a very low cost. I bought 8  12" x 17" sheets of thin magnet paper for a project for church. (Only $.50 each.) But alas! we decided to go in another direction so I was left with lots of magnet sheets. I decided to make some personalized paper dolls for the grandchildren who will be here in a few short days. In the past, I used photographs and my Xyron 900 machine and the laminate/magnet roll to create refridgerator magnets of mom, dad, both grandparents, some aunts, and the children themselves. (They lost the magnet with my photo! How could that be?) This time, I wanted to have lots of costumes for the children to use with their dolls so I decided photographs wouldn't do.

I found a great website called Making Friends with lots of multi-cultural paper dolls with many costumes. Then I found some good shots of the grandchildren's faces. I selected the paper doll page I wanted to use, then right clicked on it and selected COPY. I opened a NEW file in Photoshop (you could use any digital photography program), then pasted the page of dolls. I also opened the photograph of my grandson with Photoshop. Using the lasso tool, I selected just his face. I copied this on the clipboard and then pasted it on the face of the paper doll. I rotated it just a bit to make it fit the angle of the head of the paper doll.



I have started to fill in the edges using the clone tool in this shot.

 Of course they were not the same size, so I used the clone tool to fill in the shape of the head with his skintone. (The paper dolls are a little fat-headed!) I used the blur tool to blend in any lines. This took me a long time to get it how I wanted it, but now I think I could do it pretty quickly. I painted the ears to match the face skin, but I didn't change the body color. (Laziness.) Sometimes I had to redraw the outlines with the pencil tool.



I used the blur tool to soften the lines that the clone tool left.



Once I had my paper dolls personalized, I went back to the website and found the clothes that I wanted. I pasted many of them into my Paint program and then selected only the specific items I planned to use. (I was trying to squish them together to save paper.) Then I printed them with my Inkjet printer on the magnetic sheets. I was concerned that they might smear, but it worked great.

One thing I encountered after I had printed out everything was that the magnets weren't very strong. Only two layers will stick together at a time. Next time I would test things out first before I printed everything.

If you can't make it to Artco, you can buy magnet sheets at craft or office supply stores. You could also printed the dolls on cardstock and glue them to those thin magnets you get as free advertisements or you could use a Xyron machine to laminate and apply a magnet.

Note: If you decide to change the size of any dolls or clothes, make sure you change all of the images by the same percentage so the clothes will fit.