Take it Further - January endings and February Beginnings

A little later than planned here is my finished doll for the January Take it further challenge.

This is the first larger art doll that I have made and am so pleased with the way she turned out. When I first read the January challenge on Sharon's blog I was really stumped by the concept so decided to concentrate on the colour theme. Immediately the colours bought to my mind a peacock. After thinking about it a bit more I realised that peacock colours where more in the blue tones that the purples shown here but I just couldn't get the idea out of my head so decided to use a bit of artistic license and raided my stash for some appropriate fabrics and began work. Seeing the little feather wings on the finished piece I think the colours have turned out to be a good match in the end.

Once the doll was finished I was really nervous about painting on the facial features as I'm no artist. I wanted to go with big eyes near the side of the face to try and suggest the way that real peacocks have eyes on either sides of their heads.I choose the lightest colour in the pallette for the legs of the doll, but after having lived with her for a couple of weeks I decided that I didn't like such large blocks of light colour. I didn't want to add shoes (peacocks don't wear shoes right?), so this morning she went back on the operating table and I added some green ribbon to break the legs up a bit. Overall now I'm pretty happy with her. The only other thing I may do is add some arm jewellery, again to try and break up the blocky colour of the arms but I will let that one mull over a bit before I decide for sure.At the moment she is known just as the Peacock Princess but I would like to give her a name. I would love to hear your suggestions. If I pick a name from the suggestions that you make I will send the winner something as a Thank You.

Now that I have finally been able to share some pictures of January's finished piece I can take some time to think about February's Challenge. I've really enjoyed making my doll so I think I will try another for February, but I think this one will be a bit different.I'm not very keen on the colour pallette this month so I am going to go with the concept, What are you old enough to remember? As with the January challenge an idea just popped into my head and I haven't been able to shake it out. I was born in 1976 and one of the earliest things that I can remember is the sound of the Rag and Bone man clip clopping down the road with his horse and cart ringing his bell and shouting. It seemed a very incongrous sight as we lived on a busy main road with cars streaming past most of the day. So my themed doll is going to be based around the Rag and Bone tradition.

As my post has already turned into an epic today I won't say any more for now but already I have some ideas of how I want my Feb doll to look ......