How a TT&T Post Gets Made

Alright, it's slow time again! My next Valentine post is in delay right now. I have every reason to believe it'll be done before the holiday, but it's not happening right now and a lull gets me itchy. So I'll take this behind-the-scenes!

[Also, I'll update soon once I know for sure, but my personal priorities generally might have to shift away for a little bit to not acquiring new toys to work with since I have projects that will require financial focus elsewhere, so more text posts might be forthcoming, or posts about other types of toys I already have and don't need to go out for! I'll try to keep active and inspired. I'm not lacking for topics, and it might be a chance to branch out even more if I have to.]

There's not much prelude that needs to be made here, so let's start talking about how this is done!

Selecting a topic

This can be pretty easy. I just think about what toy is driving my attention the most at the moment, figure out decide through dubious reason if it's sensible to acquire at the moment, and bring it in. Most of the time, I find myself blogging by chasing a current driving whim rather than following a long-planned topic, though there are several things I keep on my list of inevitable projects, and sometimes I go in to pursue those. 

I started this blog with no intention for it to reflect my creative work, because dolls weren't fully a creative medium for me yet and I didn't consider them a major outlet for me as a creative. I was just here for the reviews and discussion at first, but now look where we are. Becoming a doll customizer has been treacherous, as it vastly broadened the list of potential candidates to work with because most nitpicks or dislikes are now just obstacles rather than outright deal-breakers! But fortunately for you, there's a lot to consider bringing on and sustaining this blog with! 

On the blog, I always aim to add something to the discussion of a doll, character, or brand which I haven't seen before. I'm very invested in discussing the context and impact of media in regard to industry and messaging, so I'll always go there because it interests me and usually informs my impressions of a toy. I try to include nuance when issues get tricky, as much of media culture does. I'm comfortable broaching observed or possible concerns, presenting the points of discussion, even when I'm in no position to claim a verdict on them, but in those cases, I make sure to mention when my background gives me no stake in a discussion, and avoid taking a stance so as not to speak over the people who would have a real say in the topic. I try to be respectful and careful with the hardest things that enter my consideration--I never edited and re-thought a post as much as I did for the first part of Skelita's project, due to my discussion of cultural representation and the doll's tricky body-image optics. I wanted to address those with as much tact and weight as I thought they deserved, while checking myself as much as I could.

I've noted there are general spheres the dolls I've covered fall into--retrospective doll reviews (because the dolls of my original collecting era are still extant and worth discussing), reacquisitions (making up for losses from my original collection that should have never happened), restyles/customs (reimagining a doll myself or creating a whole new character), and collector doll reviews for releases I bought in on. I just want to show people something new!

Writing/Photo Documentation

Before I ever had the nerve to start a blog, I wrote private doll reviews to myself during my original collecting era. I still have them around! These were simpler and perhaps less thoughtful than I'd write them today, and feel more like documentation of thoughts than polished review. Also, as a well-meaning but sheltered teen just beginning to broaden my mind and acquire greater social consciousness and empathy, I also wasn't quite as informed or open to many issues I know more about today. When I wrote about social concerns in the toys then, I found myself jumping more to condemn issues I had no say in, or to defend things I question more now. For example, bringing up Skelita again, teen-me wrote much more skeptically about her Mexican representation, despite my lack of stake in the issue and ignorance about her creative background, and I also defended the troubling imagery of her body sculpt and clothing/stand functionality more than I do today. 

Still, I retained this hobby of writing down my thoughts and ideas in the buildup to my blog. Thus, for several topics I know confidently will be on the blog sooner or later, I prepare drafts, either through Blogger or off it, to set up my angle and points of discussion for a doll. The old drafts I wrote were wishful thinking that verged on fantasy as I wrote complete discussions of dolls I didn't even own, including material that verged on reviewing the consumer experience of toys I didn't have! I was sourcing secondhand descriptions of things that I couldn't verify and really just daydreaming about toys that were out of reach. It's a little embarrassing to me now, reading all of those inauthentic reviews of dolls I never acquired which were written like I had. I don't deign to lay out thoughts that only an in-hand owner could have in my drafts now!

When the subject is in hand and being played with and photographed, much of the original structure of a blog draft may be rendered obsolete by the flow of the experience with the actual thing and any surprises therein, or time may have passed enough to change my angle, so most of a draft's content does not end up unaltered in the final post. I embrace the photos I take during my sessions as the bones of the new review structure, since it's easy to document aspects I need to talk about with pictures, and then form the text around those stages of the photo sessions. Looking at a post's stored photos in chronological order almost functions as a checkpoint/guide system for each post, since I can see which photo, and thus, which talking point, is next. I typically save the photos to my computer with descriptive names rather than numbers so it's easier to pull them up and upload to a post, but I can still use my phone to look at the order they were taken and keep everything sorted out.

Generally, my experience with a doll review is to look at them as they arrived to me, and then go top-to-bottom through their costume and body features before modifications come in--though sometimes, I choose to modify something off the bat to bring it closer to how it was supposed to look, and many posts are customization-only and not trying to give a full review to the base doll. With smaller toys, usually fewer photos are required and summary is much swifter, though discussion can still be rich. I've been interested in discussing some plush toys I've collected, but I'm a little worried there's not functionally much I can photograph or write about them. For custom dolls, I sometimes document the steps of the process, but never that thoroughly, and sometimes, very little at all since I tend to tunnel-vision and get into the zone during any artmaking process. 

In addition to the written structure being best shaped by my linear experience with a toy, I find I much prefer writing the majority of a post off-the-cuff and in the moment, anyway. It feels more authentic to me to write the thing directly from the experience, and I think I express myself better in review or analysis when writing in more of an immediate response style. While I pre-emptively named this blog for my tangents, I do think I get to the point a little better when I'm writing in the moment and from photos! The drafts can still help to isolate talking points I want to ensure are included, even if I end up rewriting the phrasing altogether.

My style as a blogger has been greatly influenced by the blogs I read, with The Toy Box Philosopher being chief among them. I've chosen to emulate TBP Emily's mix of professional style and personal insight, with my own flavor of exhaustive deep-dives and social analysis. Her use of photo stories to explore play with dolls has also influenced me, though I personally favor employing a fourth wall and not characterizing dolls as being aware of me unless Maudie is involved. 

I've also long-enjoyed Monkfish's Dolly Ramble for his unabashedly honest salty critiques toward toy-company BS and their reviews have showcased a lot of things not seen on other blogs. My chosen writing style is very different, but I did think I channeled him a bit in the saltier parts of my first O.M.G. look-over, which was very fun. 

Lastly, my blog makes tribute to another blog I read closely during my original doll era, which went defunct not long after I discovered it-- Christina Articulates. The structure in which I name my review titles with a thematic phrase and then a subtitle listing the product's name is taken directly from her. 

And of course, as inspired the blog's name, a cup of tea is a common accompaniment with my work writing this blog.

Cover Photo

The cover photo of each toy post is meant to display the subject artistically, filtered through a layer of appeal or mystery. I want to make each post intriguing, regardless of any reader's held opinion toward the subject, and I can't give away the fun within the first thing you see! I like these photos to be more produced, playing with filters, scenery, staging, lighting, and photo editing to make them more pretty, elaborate, and/or graphical so I present the subject in an appealing way. The aim is generally also for the pictures to serve as teasers that don't give away the whole look of whatever I'm talking about, especially when I'm doing customization. The obscurity can come in through cropping, removing most of the colors, letting lighting obscure things, or using silhouettes or other framing to keep the toy's full picture unclear. 

For examples of things I'm not showing through my cover photos...

• The first Twylapost shows the trio of dolls mostly shadowed with their luminous-painted eyes aglow. While this showcases the character's coolest hidden feature as a toy, it also obscures the presence of significant customization with the Coffin Bean doll in the post (right).

• Gooliope Jellington is shown leg-down to emphasize her scale, but this also obscures most of the modifications I made to the doll--the only obvious thing is the striped twine I attached to her skirt, but this photo likely couldn't be identified as displaying the fact that I had doubled up the doll's skirt, so most of the changes are out of sight while presenting a dynamic, interesting photo to highlight the key appeal of the doll--her size.

• My work with Lagoonas spotlights my custom character Gilliana in a (I'll say so myself) stunning lighted composition in a tank...but very little detail of Gilliana herself can be seen as a result of the murky water and backlit staging--all you know from this photo is that she's promised to be interesting! The G3 Lagoona in this post was also quite restyled, so she's staged in profile and shadow and is not the center of the photo to keep my work with her mysterious too.

• In my Cleo de Nile post, the two factory-style Cleos are holding a piece of clothing to obscure the Old-Skull restyled, transformed Skulltimate Secrets Cleo--showing one doll less is a viable technique if a multi-doll post doesn't feature customization across the board!

• Similarly, in my cover photo for Robecca and the Elles, City Ghouls Elle Eedee (right) is turned back-to-camera because she's the doll of the trio who I altered. This created a good composition for the three, but it also obscured the customization work to leave something to discover.

However, while I like to disguise things to hook a reader, I don't hide any of the post's subjects. All of my cover photos are meant to display the whole scope of a post's featured stars, if not precisely showing every thing--for example, my 2023 Playmobil posts show zoomed-in piles of the figures at hand in each post, though not every single one is visible.  I'm not springing any toys completely out of nowhere, because what if a reader would have been enticed to the post by seeing that toy in the cover?

When I do serialized posts for finite projects, I like their cover photos to follow an aesthetic theme so they feel like a proper group, and I thus shoot the photos and/or edit and graphically design them in conversation with each other. 

With my RESTYLE ICONS series, I devised a separate subset of cover photos based on the example set by Invisi Billy. 

Alas, the image is outdated by my revision to his styling--read that here!

Somewhat arbitrarily, Billy's post set a precedent of the RESTYLE ICONS covers all featuring the series title and the name of the character at hand through graphic text. I don't remember my rationale, but it set the series apart more by giving it an identity as a recurring feature, and this method allowed me to display the restyled character's name outside of the post title, where it might have been more clunky. With the series, I try to give each ICON a graphic style aligned with their character and a different kind of graphic media. Billy's was based on pulp horror comics, while Operetta's was more like a music poster or retro ad in her fifties rockabilly style...

...Scarah's was more sixties and psychedelic per her theming...

...Rochelle's was more like a vintage fashion ad...

...Deuce's was a portrait on a Greek coin over stone...

...and most recently, Jackson's plays on a split theme with aspects of punk graphics per my choice to blend Jekyll and Hyde in one design for him. 

Otherwise, I'll use stylization as a way of presenting the doll nicely and clearly, but not needing to adhere to true life. Sometimes the cover photo isn't clearly envisioned and gets selected from other art photos, and sometimes it's designed for the purpose from the start. 

I don't always reiterate the cover photo later in the post unless I have something to discuss about it. 

The cover photo isn't necessarily my favorite picture taken with the doll, either--it's just what I choose to open a post. Sometimes the best picture is found in the...

Other art photos

The process for these is really not formulaic or even. Some dolls give me lots of art-photo inspiration, like Gooliope or G3 Venus but other times, the subject or my means don't give me a trove of really special photos. My first pass at G3 Abbey Bominable didn't light me up as a photographer because at the time, there was no snow to photograph her in, and her post got published with what I could take. Later, snow stuck around for a couple of days (hasn't returned since) and I got some proper pictures with her. I guess this is the place to say I've replaced her post's cover photo with this now, as well as added the snowy photos of her and Fearidescent Draculaura to their respective posts:

So artistic greatness can come on a delay. I also got this great family photo of the Steins to add to my Bride of Frankenstein Skullector review, well after its publication. 

My Instagram page is the first place I'll put retroactive photo art of previously-blogged dolls, but I'll try to add them into posts after the fact, too. 

While having a lot of photo success is often a strong correlation with how much I adore a doll, it's not always even. I've found dolls I got multiple great photos from even though I wasn't hugely passionate toward them, like G3 sig Clawdeen, and had dolls I really loved but who stumped me for art photos, like City Ghouls Elle Eedee. Not everybody's a natural photo model even if they're stunning. 

Putting it together

My order of operations on a blog post is not regimented. Most of the photos I need will be taken before most of the writing, but I usually outline things before receiving and/or photographing a toy, and I often have to go back and take new photos mid-writing to account for conversation points I thought of or gaps in my documentation. It's generally pretty smooth, though Blogger is not the best-coded platform so there are often little quirks and bugs I have to account for, like not pasting too many images in a row because then Blogger will send them to the bottom of the page if not broken up by text. I look things over and publish, and then do the curation on the other blog pages--adding links to a chronological list and a broad index of categorized posts. When I debut an original character with a Monster High profile, I add that to its own page. After publication, I invariably find things to tweak, so I do go back and correct typos and clarify things that need clarified because I'm very picky about reading correctly and putting my points out there. I can't sit on posts for too long to reread them before publishing, so things can slip through on a newly-published post. But then it's out there, and I check for feedback (always appreciated and welcome) and think about what's next. Rinse, repeat. 

See you in the next project!