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Sculptor creates lifelike replicas; dolls purchased by collectors around world |
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Written by Valerie Hill, Waterloo Region Record
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Wednesday, July 01 2009, 8:03 PM |
CAMBRIDGE, Ont. — Everyone cringes when Dawn McLeod tells them that she puts her babies in the oven.
It’s an understandable reaction when you see her hand-sculpted baby dolls. They’re so startlingly realistic you can see veins under the skin and creases and wrinkles on their tiny feet.
McLeod, a mother of two boys ages five and three, says she had no idea she possessed this particular talent until three years ago.
“After having my second child, I didn’t want to go back to work,” the former clerical worker says. “I was hoping to find something to keep me at home.”
Well, she found it all right, but in the oddest place.
“I saw a photo of a tiny clay baby and thought, ’I can do that,”’ she recalls. “I’ve always been very artsy.”
Originally, her idea was to find a way of capturing the look of her second son, then five months old.
“I didn’t want him to grow up,” she admits. “I wanted to hold on to his infancy.”
A clay replica seemed an ideal solution. Then she wondered if there might be a market for that kind of baby doll.
“I looked on eBay to see if there was something like them and there were thousands,” she says, still surprised now to have discovered there was a whole world of collecting she knew nothing about.
The dolls she saw on eBay fell under the firm’s category of One Of A Kind (OOAK) baby, and while not all were good quality, there was definitely a demand for them.
After reading everything she could find and obtaining tools and supplies, McLeod began to sculpt using a special polymer clay that is then cured in her kitchen oven.
Eighteen months later she made her first eBay sale, a $175 doll, and very quickly her sculpting morphed into a business called Dawn’s Precious Angels (www.dawnspreciousangels.com).
With it, McLeod found her passion and an extraordinary talent. And as her skills and reputation grew, so did her prices. Today, one of her 25-centimetre dolls generally fetches about US$500 when auctioned on eBay, although one sold for $1,000. Her 13-centimetre dolls fetch $200 to $400. Her work has been purchased by collectors in Australia, France, Russia, Spain and New Zealand.
One Pennsylvania collector has purchased 50 dolls.
“She’s my No. 1 fan,” McLeod says with a laugh.
The dolls are sold wearing clothes that McLeod also makes. Some hold tiny stuffed animals produced by McLeod’s mother.
In less than three years, McLeod has sold 355 dolls, yet she is largely unknown in her hometown. That could change if she finds local venues to sell her work, she says.
At a chance meeting one day, a man asked if she could sculpt a doll of his grandson, using photographs as a guide. McLeod obliged, but the art form, known as portrait sculpting, is tricky and she now charges a $100 premium.
“It’s very rewarding to be able to take a picture and sculpt a doll,” she says.
In some cases, she sculpted dolls based on photos of babies that have passed away. The families were desperate to have a tangible way of remembering their little one.
“I bring them solace,” says McLeod, who sheds tears when she works on these projects.
McLeod has also learned an art form called “reborns,” which involves removing the manufacturer’s paint from a child’s vinyl doll, or a doll mould, and then repainting to create a more realistic-looking baby doll.
Reborns are a separate genre for collectors and in great demand partly because they are usually made from a material more pliable than the clay dolls, which can easily shatter. Reborns are also weighted to feel like the real thing, and the hair is rooted into the scalp so it can be brushed. Some designers go so far as to add electronics that stimulate a baby’s heartbeat and breathing. Heat packs inside the dolls can make them feel alive.
This fall McLeod will be one of 12 clay doll makers to study under U.S. doll maker Jack Johnston (www.artdolls.com) in an invitation-only masters class.
Though McLeod loves all her creations, she by far prefers to create her own dolls. She finds inspiration when she sees baby buggies in a store or on the street. If there is a particularly cute baby, she says, she may stop to coo and chat, making mental notes about the baby’s features. These could be the inspiration for her next work.
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