The Doctor Is In…sane!

Here's another wool doll design I did for a friend that turned into a very cool piece of 3-D art. This time it's a warm and fuzzy version of Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. A fantastic story that seems forever-relevant.

The photograph is, of course, the finished doll done by my friend. It's a pretty elaborate doll and it took long enough to construct that I started feeling guilty about designing so many details into it. But the finished piece is worth it. The good doctor has a collared shirt with a cravat, a vest, a tails coat lined in purple to match the vest, cuffed trousers and, so help me, spats. I love spats. If I could somehow bring spats back into popular fashion, I would. No other article of clothing seems to capture that air of elegance and utter nonsense.

If you'd like to see more images of the doctor and his alter ego, visit the gallery on the runredrun blog. Don't forget to check out the work-in-progress photos of the doll. And if you'd like to hire Alex Patho Jr., the skilled photographer that took these fantastic pictures, visit him at his pathophoto site.

Finally, at the bottom, I've posted some work-in-progress images for my design. Those are my first pencil sketches (and subsequent ink line) for Jekyll and Hyde. Early on, Hyde was slightly more human than he turned out to be in the end (and, curiously, somewhat muppet-like). But as my friend constructed the doll, we kept pushing for him to look more monstrous. "Make his teeth bigger!" I'd say, or "Lose the whites of the eyes so they look like cold, dead shark's eyes." Somehow, though, as his cranial proportions became more distorted and his facial features more extreme, he got, well, cuter. And isn't that really the most dangerous kind of beast? One that hides his murderous intentions behind a disarming veil of cutesy-tootsy? -v