The children offered the horses carrots and apples as a special treat....
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With the horses in their stalls, it was time to get some hay....  It was usually the stable hand's job, but Baron wanted to teach his children more about the care of horses....  
  
 Baron and Naomi wanted to get their children used to being around horses, and the best place to do it was in the stable...       Sparkle and Nuri had come over to help Mika and Gabi finish decorating their tree....       Exactly a month ago today, my newest guy arrived. He's Elliot by SartoriaJ, and he's on their new David body. I only had one wig - the first one I'd made for Matias and had rejected - so put it on him and tried a few outfits on him... 
I had ordered him to be Sarah's partner....but wasn't happy with Matias' rejected wig on him either.  So, I made him his own wig, and an outfit using some of the same fabric as I'd used on Sarah's gown as an accent.  Since I usually tend to keep my doll's company sculpt name, but I already have two Elliots, and in his promotional photos he was commander of their French Napoleonic army series last summer, I will call him Elliot Henri...  Ruby Red sent me a sample of the Prince Edwin doll I designed, and since the stable was still up at the time, that's where Princess Zora got to meet him for the first time...     Back in early December I was trying to get in the holiday mood, and thought a Christmas story from 2018 would make a great book. So my sister and I got started. But back in 2018 I wasn't taking quite as many interesting photos of any particular scene, and there weren't enough good photos to tell the ending to the story properly. So, I made the decision to reshoot the entire ending. Which meant that I had to set up the scene in Santa's workshop exactly the same as it had been back in 2018, so the new photos would fit in seamlessly. The original set from 2018...   The new set was almost identical, except for I messed up the order of two chairs. And I no longer had the same coloured balloons. But since I was reshooting the entire ending, it wouldn't matter. But everything else was identical, although I did pay attention to the time on the clock this time, positioning the hands at a better time, and moving them as I took the photos for the story.  Balloons were strung on ribbons from a string across the room...  I often try give depth to a room to make it seem more in scale. In a real human-size room the farther corners will be darker than the foreground, but in such small doll-size rooms, there is no scale to the lighting because the room is not very deep. So, I deal with it in Photoshop. I process the photos with the foreground lighting like I want it to be....  Then create a darker version...  I copy and paste the darker version on top of the lighter version, and use the brush tool to bring out the foreground....  Then I crop in. Then the foreground is light, and the background is darker, and the room has the depth of lighting like a real full size room...  I took a lot of new photos, and had to watch out for tension points, like in this next photo where the clock is positioned directly between Winston's horns - like some Egyptian god - so, I had to go reshoot....  Then after reshooting the entire ending, we decided the story was missing a few vital scenes. Like Santa out and about delivering gifts. So, on a cold snowy evening, we packed Santa and his sleigh into the car, and headed out looking for the best lit houses in our neighbourhood to use as background. We'd park on the side of the road, pull out the projector stand, place Santa on it and quickly take a few photos. Then I'd take close-ups so the stand wasn't showing....
At one location, where I put the sleigh on the stand with him, I piled snow on it to hide the stand...  And of course when working on a book, one thing tends to lead to another, and we decided we needed some photos of Santa and his elves loading up the sleigh. but where would they be doing that. Not outside in the snow. How about in a barn or stable, where the sleigh would be kept the rest of the year? So I put together a stable using walls and props I had on hand....  I had to check photos from the original story to dress the same dolls in the exact same Elf outfits....   Well, the stable scene turned out so well, that one thing led to another, and I used it for two more scenes that were not in the original story from 2019... Santa arriving at the North Pole  ...and leaving on Christmas Eve...  All the new scenes made a great addition to the story, and the book...  |
AuthorMartha Boers is an award-winning Canadian doll artist and costumer, who enjoys photographing, and coming up with stories, featuring her vast collection of ball-jointed and artist dolls. Archives
August 2026
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