Dollz
Dollz, cartoon dolls or pixel dolls are small pixelated digital images, generally of people. They are mainly used online as avatars, signatures or displayed as artwork on personal Web pages.
Dolls range in size from being a few pixels high to a few hundred pixels high. Generally, dolls are human, mainly female, figures. Dolls are generally dressed, and come in a wide range of styles. Bases are the template upon which dolls are created—the naked human form with no hair.
People who create dolls are called dollers or dollists. The community is well interlinked because of both message board communities and the concept of "adoption." Adoption is the act in which a doller displays a favored doll that was created by someone else upon their Web site, with credit and a link to the other's site or email. Adoption is not performed with bases.
"Dolling" has become a widespread Internet phenomenon, spawning numerous Web sites, communities, forums, online competitions and other activities. Some dollers sell their digital art commercially and their graphic images are either used as clip art or on merchandise. However, dolling is simply a personal hobby for many.
History
The roots of this phenomenon are in paper dolls, which are paper figures with a base body to which clothes, hairstyles and accessories can be attached. The first digital version of this concept was the Kisekae Set System, invented in 1991.
Cartoon dollz were first created to be used as avatars in a graphical chat client called The Palace. Although their early history is quite convoluted, it is generally accepted that they were first created by Melicia Greenwood (also known as Innocents, or Shattered Innocents) in 1995 [1]. These pixel avatars had bodies made out of 44px by 44px squares (called "props" in The Palace Chat) and were dressed by drawing clothes on the remaining 6 props. Widely adopted by teenagers as a sign of rebellion, they eventually became very popular on The Palace and were known under various names such as "lil' people", "sk8ers", "preps", and "paper dolls"[2]. Doll avatars were passed around amongst Palace users who would edit each other's work, and many different styles were created as a result of this.
Early doll websites began emerging in the late 1990's and early 2000's, showcasing people's edits of palace dolls (examples of these include Veriria's Palace). No longer being bound by the restrictions of Palace Chat (which only supported web colors and needed to fit in a 3x3 grid of 44px by 44px props), dolls eventually became more and more elaborate. More recently, dollers began to think of their work as more than an internet fad, and many see an artistic purpose behind this hobby. On August 3, 2007 a separate dolls category was added to DeviantArt, which further contributed to this vision of dolling an art form. [3]
Technique
Dolls are created in a graphics program such as Microsoft Paint, Adobe Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, or GIMP. The doll may be made on a base, or the doll may be baseless. If using a base, clothing, adornments, and decorations are drawn onto the base to create the doll. Baseless dolls are drawn freehand, with an effect often akin to Oekaki. Many tutorials exist explaining how to create dolls.
Bases
Bases are the templates upon which dolls can be drawn. They consist of the naked human form in a pose normally without hair. Bases can be outlines of human figures; they can come with or without faces; they can come with props or accessories; they can come in multiple skintones; or they can depict a partial or full body view. Bases need not be realistic; they can be deformed, exaggerated or cute, and may be in the anime super deformed style.
Typically, bases are arranged in a set, where all the bases in the set are created in the same size, style and proportions, but with different poses, skin tones and facial expressions. These sets are generally given names to identify and distinguish them. Some base sets have nearly 100 individual poses.
Some artists allow others to change faces and skin tones of a base, some disallow any editing of the template but only the strict pixeling of clothing and hair, while others allow any and all edits to a base.
Doll-makers
Doll-makers are similar to the old method of paper dolls where a base and clothes were provided and the user makes combinations of clothes to create their doll. This became a trend in the community, and many people who did not want to create their own dollz from scratch utilized these drag-n-drops to make their own combination. The original doll makers were simple drag and drop versions that contained props found around the Palace Chat but have over time evolved into feature-rich programs and started to feature original props by the dollmaker's creator.
The dolling subculture
Main activities in online dolling communities are sharing artwork and advice, themed events and competitions. Friendly dollers may collaborate on artwork, and link to each other's sites as 'sibling sites' or 'sister sites', or affiliations, which is simply linking to another's dolling site.
Dolling etiquette and issues
The dolling community has long been plagued by plagiarism and copyright issues. Some abuses arise from ignorance of copyright law and some from willful or malicious behavior. Within the dolling community, the term Netiquette[4] generally refers to the copyright laws and stated rules, or "terms of use" many dollers impose for use of their artwork.
Copyright violation occurs when a person saves a doll that another has created, places it on their site, or uses it as an avatar or signature or similar without permission or attribution, and/or claims that he or she him/herself created the doll. This is regarded as theft, and different from "adoption," when the user who places the doll on his or her site gives credit to the original creator and often provides a link to the original site, as dictated by the terms of use required by the original creator. This is an issue even when only the base has been copied. When someone takes a part of a doll (for example, the hair or clothing) and places it on their own doll, it is also seen as plagiarism and referred to as "frankendolling" in the dolling community.
Some dolls are classified by their creators as "Not Adoptable" and some bases as "Exclusive" or "Not Usable".
Direct linking, aka inline linking, or hot-linking is another common copyright (and bandwidth) problem in dolling communities.
In 2003 there was a move by Heli of sweetandsassy.net[5] to create Standard Doll Site Terms (SDST). The idea was to come up with what was essentially a standard license for doll site authors to use so that visitors wouldn't have to read the rules all the time.[6]
See also
References
- ^ Greenwood, Melicia (2005-12-14). "The Originz of Dollz". Archived from the original on 2006-12-09. Retrieved 2010-03-29.
{{cite web}}:|archive-date=/|archive-url=timestamp mismatch; 2005-12-14 suggested (help) - ^ Borgeson, Mitch. "Playing with dollz". Salon.com. Retrieved 2010-03-29.
- ^ "News: Doll Category Now Open!". Retrieved 2010-03-29.
- ^ Frequently referenced doll netiquette rules page
- ^ http://web.archive.org/web/20070626184903/http://www.sweetandsassy.net/pages/g_1stanniv.htm
- ^ http://web.archive.org/web/20030803144304/http://members.surfeu.fi/sdst/termeng.html