It's only been about 10 years since I painted my OG Monkey Island nesting doll set, but now I've decided it's time for a second set, this time featuring some of the awesome women from the series - The Voodoo Lady, Elaine Marley, Carla the Swordmaster, Morgan LeFlay and Kate Capsize.
I think that Monkey Island has some really impressive female characters - independent and intelligent high-achievers who are fully capable of fighting their own battles. As a kid playing Monkey Island I wanted to be Elaine Marley!
So here is the first chapter on the long journey of creating a custom nesting doll set. I start out doing lots of sketches in pencil, trying not to miss any items or costume details I want to include (such as maps, root beer bottles etc). I enjoy working with the Monkey Island characters as throughout the 5 games there hasn't been a set definitive design for reoccurring characters, the design styles and costumes change from game to game and even in the Special Editions. This allows me more freedom to interpret the characters in my own style and to pick and choose my favourite elements.
With this set I have decided to include arms which I didn't have in the original Monkey Island set. I like that I can include additional items to show personality such as pistols and cutlasses this way. I scanned in these sketches and stitched them together on Photoshop before colouring them roughly. The coloured version will be really helpful as reference when I paint the actual dolls. You can see that I only design a front and back, which means I have to freestyle the sides a bit when painting. I don't think it would be possible to design a 3D nesting doll design in full, thus I don't intend the finished dolls to look identical to these designs, they are just for reference!
As a last note, this set is actually a set of 6, but as you can see I have only made 5 designs. The smallest doll is really tiny so I don't think I could paint a whole character on it, at the moment I'm still considering what to paint on it - I'm thinking it could be a parrot or perhaps a diamond à la the Blood Island diamond/ Elaine's cursed wedding ring. Anyway, I will have to think about it...
As an extra extra note it's pretty cool to see the differences in my designs for the same characters 9 years apart. For example, here are designs for Elaine Marley from 2012 and 2021 side by side:
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| Elaine Marley designs |
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| The Voodoo Lady designs |
Of course now I am sitting here having a crisis wondering if I have improved much since 2012. I definitely skimped out on a lot of drawing practice over the last decade by not setting it as a priority, something I need to remedy for the future. It'll be interesting to see the finished dolls side by side!
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