The first step, for me, is to make working drawings. These drawings are done to scale to get a template from which to build the actual doll. (Once I figure out how to get the blog interface to play nice, I will upload the sketches. )

The first sketch (front view) took a while. About 3 hours, I think. It has been a while since I have done a drawing like that and I have never done one in such detail. The skull was the trickiest part. I had never really paid that much attention to the structure of faces before. I am getting better at noticing it, but after completing the sketches, I keep looking at faces on TV and seeing skulls! Once that was completed, I took a layer of trace and sketched an overlay of muscle and fat to get a look at how the finished doll might look. That part was the fast part.

Then, there was some experimenting with makeup, coloring, and hair to see if that face would work with the concept I had in mind. (More trace paper!) I did not really experiment too much with that for this project, so that was also fast. 

Once I was okay with all of that and decided to proceed with the skeleton I had , I sketched the side view of the skeleton. That took 2 hours, which is better than the 3 hours I originally estimated it would take. 

And that is good enough to get working on the body, though, in the future, I do want to make a scan of the side view and flip it. That would make it easier to remember to make opposing pairs of bone. Or if I could find my roll of trace paper, I could do the side view on the trace paper, and then flip the trace paper over. A back view of the pelvic bone and the shoulder girdle would be nice, too.