How does/has your 'character doll' inspire you?

I wouldn't say they inspire me so much as they just make me happy. I love my characters, and I love collecting art of them, writing about them, and having dolls of them. They don't inspire me to write anything in particular, but my wife and I created a couple and I bought dolls of them, and looking at them makes me think of how in love they are and how much I love my wife, too. They just make me happy!

 

I'm certainly not 'novel-writing' level creative, so for me the doll helps with very simple stuff. I twist the doll into different positions, and if one of them looks interesting, I try to imagine how the character got into that position.

Say the doll looks cute with his head tilted up. I try to imagine why the character might look up. Is he looking at the sky or a tree? At the tree itself or something in the tree? A cat stuck in the tree, or another kid sitting on a branch? Do they talk to each other? -- and so on.

It's a basic sort of exercise and probably wouldn't help with plot structure, but maybe with characterization or even dialog. Mostly it's 'un-blocking', just to get myself started thinking creatively in the first place.

 

Mine inspire my creativity. My stories and characters mostly live inside my head, so it gives me stuff to think about when I'm absolutely stressed out, or bored. Haha.

I'm also a freelance artist, so my dolls help me with my warmup sketches and other things. I'd like to think they help me with character development as well.

 

I use dolls to come up with new characters. I already have an entire main cast running around in my little story, but sometimes I need new characters to help fill the gaps.I like letting the dolls inspire me, it's like a little writing warm-up; I take a doll, look at the pictures and try to determine a life story. In some cases, I really like it and end up falling for the doll. And in others I still don't like anything about it, so I just scratch it all. Most of the time though, I keep the character, despite not liking the doll.
This may seem a little weird, but I really prefer it to looking for sculpts that look like my characters. It's just that I can find quite a few sculpts that look like my characters and maybe even give off a similar vibe but 9 times out of 10 the sculpt itself doesn't inspire me in the same way that dolls that I've designed a characters around do.

 

OH my god.. This is it. Im late to this thread but i actually need say no more...
(right down to the 2 years of no characters for the dollies and the trying to tie writing and drawing into my bjd hobby...holy cow..)

 

Mine motivate/motivated me to complete NaNoWriMo--at the very beginning my dolls were based on a couple of frequently occuring NaNo characters that I used, and just looking at them would help me along. They still do this, of course, even after the massive purge and character overhaul that I did due to a large personal tragedy.

However, now that I'm rebuilding the world they live in and the background of my mains/creating new characters, they inspire me to do the research I need to make them more solid. As an example: I've always been very interested in space (particularly space colonization) but I've never been as knowledgable as I am now that I've been reconstructing Max's character. I've learned a lot of very interesting things, like about the different Martian calendar ideas put forward and the amount of time it takes for a message from Earth to reach Mars and the other way around. That's not even counting the massive amount of teensy, near useless fun little factoids I've learned unrelated to this one central thing.

I'm not sure what it is about having the doll here that makes this whole worldbuilding/writing process that much more urgent. Maybe it has something to do with doing the work of art that it is justice or the fact that it's a tangible reminder of your work or something like that, but in the end all I know is that I have never done this much research related to my worldbuilding before I began collecting and customizing these dolls.

 

I'm no novelist, I'm a fanfiction person. And that is why 2 of my 3 dolls are based on existing characters. One of them is historical, and I bet he would turn in his greave, if he still was in there, if he knew what his doll persona was into most of the times. I have read Fiction and Fanfiction about him, and I have written my share of them myself, but for some strange reason, even though I get inspired for new plots when I try on outfits or make photoshoots (plotbunnies just jump me sometimes) I have never written those down. Same goes for the second, the purely fictional character. You would compleatly considder him ooc, because he is based on my own fictional world (created around him since he arrived here) of an existing fictional world. It's very strange.....

But on topic again, they do inspire me. I talk to them, I handel them (sometimes more sometimes less), I redress them and I take them to photoshoots, and that is when they inspire me. Even if it's only a story in my head.... Sometimes compleat new outfits have been created or drawn out at least from such an idea, or the decor for a new photoshoot has been assambled and made. In the ende I never use them.... or at leats not for the original purpose

Even thou they are not basically my own characters, they have more of an own personalyty than the original personalyty, so what do you count them as? (I normaly call them "leisurly-based-on...")
Hope the my little two cents helped you out.

 

I'm about to start a fanfiction collection, too! I just ordered a tan Rosen from DollShe. He's going to be based on the First Born race of the Barsoom series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, but he will be an original character I'm creating. I just love the books and want to make dolls based on the series, to include some of its actual characters. The First Born are my favorite race so I'm starting with one of them. I think Soom's London would make a great Dator Xodar from the series, but he's so much smaller than the dolls I prefer and want to build from the set that I'm afraid he won't work. He's perfect otherwise, but the height thing just isn't going to work. I can't have every other character be a 1/3 and a prince of the black pirates of Barsoom a 1/4!!!

And I want this collection because I love the series and it's just fun to own a piece of the magic, I guess!