From Picture to Reality

Now that we were an official business with a bank account and everything, it was time to see if a doll could be made from my guardian angel drawings.  This is what’s known as making a prototype.  First you make a sample doll and then you take that to a factory and they see if they can copy it for mass production.




My mom knew a guy that had a girlfriend who was in art college.  She knew how to sew and loved the idea of taking one of my drawings and making it into a doll.  This is where my dad stepped in and said we needed her to sign an NDA.  That stands for Non Disclosure Agreement.  That’s a contract that says you wont take my idea and steal it.  It’s a good idea to protect your IP (that stands for Intellectual Property) as much as possible.  Besides NDAs you need copyrightspatents and trademarks. She signed the NDA and we were good to go.

Of course we started with the Ally drawing.  We knew the doll wouldn’t be exactly like my drawing.  I drew the head way too big and the body way to skinny.  The head would flop around too much if we made the doll like that.  So my dad took my drawing, scanned it and made some changes in photoshop.  He made the head a little smaller and the body a little wider.

Then we figured out what size the guardian angel doll was going to be.  I wanted kids to be able to grab the doll with one hand.  We figured if the doll was 8 inches tall, the body would be a half-inch wide, which is a perfect size for kids hands.  My dad worked up the dimensions and sent it off.


 

The first version she made was pretty good.  We only had a couple of things we wanted to change.  The biggest thing was that the skirt wasn’t bell-shaped like the drawing.   It fell down straight along the body.  Then we figured that if the doll’s body had a bell shape then the clothes would take on that shape and it would look more like my drawing.  The second version of the doll did the trick and we were now ready to move forward.