Clerics in yarn form

It's been forever since I made dolls for myself (and even longer since I've finished some; poor SwampFox still doesn't have armor or weapons), so I decided that, darnit, I was going to make a Raff. And, amazingly, I finished him! ...mostly. I still want to make him another outfit and his other animal sidekicks. And I even got some work done on the Cyn doll I "finished" two years ago.

So without further ado, a very image (and ramblings) heavy post- you can click the photos to be taken to flickr or to see them larger.

Here's Raff in his "official" outfit:

The priest robe and winged fox quarterstaff are what he needs to have when he's on duty as a Messenger. And yup, I did base the robe off the drawing Niere did for me.

If it wasn't obvious from the uneven hem of the robe, the dirt stains painted on (which are a lot more obvious in person- the picture washed that out), and the "stitches" on the one sleeve, Raff is a friggin' mess. As my fiancé so aptly put it, he's the elven equivalent of Pigpen. LOL! He was originally training to be a ranger, so he's constantly covered in dirt ... and small animals. That's his pet mouse on his shoulder.

There are two nice and neat things about Raff, though, that I made sure to include on the doll- his intricately braided hair (he has several tiny braids and two larger ones pulled back at the sides) and a jade and gold pendant necklace (I made that out of clay and gold-colored chain) that was given to him by his best friend. Otherwise, he looks like something the cat dragged in. ;)


Unlike a lot of religious orders, Messengers are allowed to be out of uniform, but only when not out on a delivery assignment (or if they have a really good reason to be going undercover...). This is what he looks like by default:

Yeah, Raff never quite got away from being a ranger, so that's his main disguise... although it's technically not a costume. He does have ranger training and this is how he's usually dressed. That sword at his belt is pointless, though; Messengers aren't allowed to wield harmful weapons, so Raff can only have this as part of a costume and never to fight with. It may as well be permanently stuck in the scabbard (which incidentally is how I sculpted it, lol).

He's wearing his crocheted leather armor and a gittern slung across his back. Here's a closeup of the gittern:

The gittern is really for his bard disguise, but I haven't made that yet.

This outfit is missing two things- a simple quarterstaff (or, rather, his actual quarterstaff, but with the fox removed- I'd have to make a different one, though) and dirt stains. This outfit should be just as messy as the robe, if not more so. However, I'm going to be making another outfit for this doll and with that one his legs and feet here would be visible- and that's a disguise he'd actually be clean for. So I can't dirty up this outfit the way I'd like.


And moving on, I didn't make too many changes to Cyn- I basically just added things he's acquired in the D&D game or that I added to his character design since I made the doll (here he is originally).

Basically he just got a fox, a javelin quiver, and some necklaces. The fox is hiding because I had to prop it up against Cyn's leg to get it to not flop over.

Here's a closeup of the quiver, along with the shield he already had:

The "H" stands for Hermes and the feather is one of the symbols of that deity.

It's not visible on the doll, but since these necklaces are Cyn's most prized possessions, I figured I should add them:

The Raff doll has an identical painted on one- that's supposed to be the amber pendant that all Messengers receive when they're Called by Hermes. (Cyn's should actually be on a gold chain, but copper was the closest color paint I had.) Cyn always wears these under his robe but never takes them off. Like I said, they're the two possessions that mean the most to him, but a Messenger isn't supposed to let anyone know about the amber necklace and the other has... er... personal meaning, so he's not about to let anyone see them. (In contrast, Raff's one necklace is always visible. That says a lot about these characters, but I'm not going to get into the reasons for this yet.)

I'll be making another outfit for Cyn at some point, but I'm going to wait until I either write about that main disguise or actually use it in the D&D game.

And here are the animals:

They're kinda wonky, but considering that the mouse is only about 3/4" tall and I'd never sculpted those kinds of animals before, they came out pretty well. I wasn't going to make a fox (the Cyn doll already has one I crocheted) but when I ended up with an animal shape too large for a mouse, I turned it into a fox and then retried the mouse.



I realized a few things as I made these dolls then placed them side by side:
1.) Cyn screwed up Raff's skintone. I should have used Cyn's (the usual doll color) for Raff and made Cyn the next color up (the color of my Caliban doll), but at the time I thought that darker color was too dark. So now Raff's stuck being pasty because I didn't want to make the two of them the same color.
2.) I make dolls differently than I used to; I didn't used to give humans ears and I used to set the eyes further apart. So Cyn looks strangely eyed or something. I was going to give him ears now but realized that if I give him that other disguise, they'd just get in the way.
3.) It's friggin' weird to see these characters the same height. Raff's a good six inches shorter than Cyn (the elf-boy is tiny), but I couldn't really show that in doll form. And yes, I do find it amusing that the physically strong, outgoing, protective fighter is so small, whereas the introverted, scholarly pacifist is about six feet tall.

Yeah, long blog post is long, but I wanted to ramble about all that. If you got this far, congrats! If not, I hope you at least liked the pictures. ;)

~Meri