Coherent Collection or Motley Crew?

Mine are pretty much of a motley crew. They are all from different companies and have different faceup styles. Some are classically pretty and others are more quirky. They are all different skin tones and eye colors and wig styles. I have a preference for dresses with Empire waistlines so almost all of them are dressed in something of that style but that's really the only similarity.

 

I started with a motley crew, and I'm trying to head more in the direction of coherent collection I'll always have some variety, but it was getting to the point that having so many dolls from different companies was starting to feel overwhelming -- I really felt like I needed to focus a bit more.

 

I wish I could say motley but I've recently sold around 4 dolls to achieve a more coherant collection. It's kind of an obsessive thing to have them all appear like they fit into the same story and world. So they need to look realistic, be of a similar size and have similar clothing style (fantasy.)
So at the moment I have Soom Sard and Soom Chrom with an Iplehouse Soori who needs a bit of work to fit in. I really want a Limwha Mono to test out the size but I'm worried he won't fit in with the group :/. I do envy those who can just collect as they please and be happy with a motley crew.

 

Yup, I'm with Raven on this one!

 

My dolls all seem to go together reasonably well, in spite of coming from several different companies. (The majority of my crew are CP sculpts, but I also have dolls from Volks, Soom, Luts and Iple House-) I do choose sculpts with the look of rest of the collection in mind, though, so it is an intentional thing.

 

I prefer coherent. I like certain kinds of faces and body shapes, so I think the dolls I get would naturally harmonize with each other in appearance, even if they're from different companies. And I'll probably never get slim minis/Minifees (even though I'd love their bodies) and hyper-realistic or hyper-stylized sculpts, because I want my crew to be coherent in proportion.

But beyond having coherent appearances, I want my dolls to have a coherent continuity, ie. world and character. I only have one doll family (no multiple storylines for me), and no matter how motley it looks, everyone has to fit into a single story/world. I will make them! Even if that means they are interdimensional travellers from different universes! (Says the world-builder in me. )

 

my collection isn't very big yet ..only 10 and 6 are fairyland dolls (4 pukipukis 2 pukifees) but the rest are quite varied ..unidoll, resin soul, lati and luts.. I prefer to look at each as an individual rather than part of a collection.. so i suspect as the family grows the motley effect will only increase ^^

 

I lean toward coherent. I tried to stick to one very specific size initially, but it just wasn't going to happen. I just have 'sub groups' now. Within each of them, I feel the looks are coherent. There's a Mecha Angel group -- same size, company, and series, so they blend by default. There's the 'OMG what did I get myself into?!' group, which is everywhere from around 55cm to 72cm that have a similar 'mature, realistic' vibe that ends up looking like people of different ages, builds, and heights, from a variety of companies. My MSD size girl is somewhat on her own, but still blends well with that group as a child, which she is (in a way). There's a 'small fashion' group, with a C-line Ino and one of Dollmore's off-topic 16inch fashion girls. The minigem girl is again a bit on her own, but as a pixie creature, she gets mixed in fine with the 'OMG' group, which is by far the largest as well.

 

I like my collections (of anything, not just dolls) to be 'matchy' to an extreme, you could say. For my collections, there must be a similarity between all the items in that collection. Size, color, shape, theme. Since I'm the type to sit there and stare at my collections and display them I prefer for them to be easy on the eyes of not just myself, but other people who will have to look at them at one point or another.

That's not to say I wouldn't get a doll I liked because it might not match with my other existing ones - I'd just choose to put it in an area separate from the others and count it as it's own collection or a small sub-category of the same collection.

Also, I tend to pair things up which can be a pain. My twin girls I'm saving for are a perfect example of that. If it weren't for me promising myself 'only these two', I'd have five different dolls, but ten in all because I'd want two of each.

Though I really enjoy looking at the diversity of other people's collections, specially those who take it to the exact opposite extreme than me (mine all the same - theirs with no two even close to being the same), I could never own that sort of collection for myself. It's one of those things for me that's awe-inspiring to look at, but not something I'd really want. Kind of like watching someone jump out of an airplane; it's neat to see other people do it, but I wouldn't want to do it myself.

 

Mine is definately coherent. I have all boys and the majority of them are from Volks. I only recently branched out to other companies to find other molds for newer story lines. It is important to me that all my dolls look well together and stay within the character story line.

 

I would have to say I have a very motley crew who go from cute to goth to dead and I have mostly yo and msd sizes but other than that I'm not very picky I just buy what I like

 

I certainly have no problems at all seeing "motley" collections - I love seeing what people have gathered together. My own resin union is probably more on the coherent side of things. At first I tried to make sizes etc work between storylines, but I've given up on that. But within storylines the dolls have to work reasonably well together. Mixing skintones I'm quite in favour of, as well as a variety of heights (but not scales within storylines), and styles of dress, but they need to be reasonably similar on the range of realism to stylized so they look like they belong together.

 

My doll crew, like my ipod playlist, is all over the place. There are recurring themes (white skin and sets of twins...or quadruplets), but forming a group with a similar look and feel plays no part in my heart's whimsey or my Paypal trigger finger.

 

I like the idea of coherency, at least a little. I've found that realistic-looking sculpts look completely out of place with my big eyed CP crowd. I don't mind differences in sculpt or dress, just as long as one doesn't stick out awkwardly from the others.

 

My dollie crew is a very mixed set... the only common factor being pale skin, but that's going to be kicked out as soon as my Ender comes home. *sigh* I even have a wide-eyed girl in there. (I heart my wide-eyed girl!)

 

My collection is mostly coherent, despite being from a variety of companies. I definitely prefer a realistic, mature aesthetic and try to stick to that as much as possible. My dolls all embody characters from a story I've been writing for years, and I want them all to resemble their characters as closely as possible. Since all the characters are adults, I want adult-looking sculpts, of close to the same proportions.

I have an unbendable list of things I want out of faceups, so most of mine are likewise realistic with an attention to detail (especially in the eyebrows, I'm *so* super picky about those). There's a fairly consistent clothing style among them, too but, again, it's because of the world they inhabit.

I do have a few wild cards though, some more anime-looking molds I purchased second hand. They both had incredibly awesome faceups I could not pass up, so I bought them and wrote some fae-like characters for them to embody.

Most of the time, though, when I branch out from what I prefer, I end up selling that doll a few months later. I don't mind "motley" collections at all, though. It's always awesome to see different sculpts and styles. But when it comes to my own, yeah, I'm pretty uniform.

 

Mine's a sort of Intergalactic Flight-Lounge. Say your flight to Alpha Centauri got delayed at your local spaceport, and you headed for the bar-- you might see a variety like this. There are beings realistic & bizarre, big & small, dark & light, tall & short, simple & elaborate, naughty & nice. When you view them all hanging out casually together in one room, you're meant to wonder what they could have in common that has brought them all here, to this nexus, of all places.

The only diversity I don't have is gender. It's a boys-only harem. ^~

Absolutely! If you're into some uniformity, but don't want a monotone collection, then you can certainly have "sub-collections". So to speak. That works for me. Though this melting-pot is mixed, I have a large gaggle of SD13 schoolboy types, almost all from the Tokyo Boys series, all bright-eyed and leggy and cute in that particular Volks Tokyo Boy way. They usually sit scattered throughout the collection, but sometimes I like to group them. The visual harmony of seeing those little teenyboppers all in a row-- it's just so pleasing. : All but 2 are by the same sculptor at Volks, so that's a whooole run of extreme harmony.

If you have the space, you could even keep your different universes 'segregated', so that you'd get a harmonious eyeful in each location. :3