Stellata’s paper doll project

The Paper doll commission Stellata asked me to do was originally a reward for her book titled 365 dresses, about her process of transitioning. I was asked to create a paper doll of Stellata and design three dresses for the doll. This was a most exciting, sensitive, and delicate project for me.

Stellata’s dress project is deep, sensitive and she shared her vulnerability through the many photographs she took of herself, showing the good days and the tough days as well. Her project has more of a documentary aspect, which shed light on the difficulties of her process.

Illustration compared to photography has the gentle advantage of being able to show ideals and wishes. Taking just a bit of artistic license I gave Stellata a slightly wider hip than she has and emphasized the femininity of her swimsuit. The project was off to a slow start, because sending swimsuit images of yourself to someone else to focus strongly on was not an easy hurdle to jump. Stellata sent a variety of poses for me to choose from, the one that you see here today was chose because of how confident she is in the movement and the gestures, inhabiting her body fully. I wanted to portray this self confidence in her body, in her movement in the illustration.

This project highlighted to me the power of illustration when dealing with self-image and body consciousness. It is a medium that allows for the portraying of the inner vision of the self. Photography in contrast captures lots of information that one might not have intended to share. An example is Stellata herself, where she looks slightly unsure, a little shy in some of her photographs, even though her goal was to exhibit confidence. With my illustration I could filter out the accidental messages of the photographs and condense Stellata as her best bold self.