This might be a daft question, but how do you achieve such a sense of fluidity to the photos of your dolls? They seem to pose in such a natural/human way, whereas often when I take pictures of my dolls, they appear stiff and overly posed.
First of all awww thank you! >u<
and sorry for the late response, I don’t claim to be any expert I just play with my dolls XD but maybe this will help you or someone else :P
When I’m posing my dolls I never just pose them once. I have an idea of what I want them to be doing and put them into that pose and then I’m constantly readjusting them and fiddling to get them looking more natural and relaxed.
Take a recent shoot I did with Knox:
The one on the left is one of the first pictures I took from that shoot, the one on the right is one of the last.
You can see even though it’s the same basic pose, there are some major changes. When I first set her up I was mostly concerned with just getting her to sit there stably (you can’t see it too well but she’s sitting on a slope) from there I just fiddled with her arms a bit and then took the photo.
From that I was able to more clearly see some of the problems. Her foot and knee were the most obvious. I love my single jointed dolls but that knee isn’t pretty! XD easy solution was to rest her arm on there.
The other thing I should point out is her other arm. Notice how straight it is? True, arms do that, but it doesn’t look very relaxed does it? So I adjusted that too and at the same time pull her sleeve down to cover the joint there, because if you have a chance to hide a joint why not? XD
Other little things that got moved are her belt, her phone, the collar of her jacket, and of course her head.
The key is just to continuously look for little details that could be better, and you won’t catch them all. If I was doing this shoot over I would move her far arm up for a better angle, and turn the hand holding the phone more outward, but if you keep looking and adjusting you’ll get better at it ^-^
My other tips are always bring putty with you, I often end up sticking some under chins if I want them looking further up than they naturally would, cover joints whenever possible, and look at the pose as if you were doing it, if it doesn’t look like it would feel comfortable or natural adjust it!
I hope that helps at least a little, it’s really just practice and noticing the details ^u^