Aug. 7, 1937 – June 12, 2024 The movies made Sylvia Kleindinst determined to become an artist. As a girl growing up in small-town Nebraska, she took sketch books to the local moviehouse, the Rialto Theatre.
There, in the dark, she drew the costumes she saw on the screen, then painted them and put them in scrapbooks. She returned to that kind of drawing while she was teaching art in the 1980s. She saw a story about paper doll collecting in Family Circle magazine and reconnected with the love she had for paper dolls while she was growing up.
She not only began collecting vintage paper dolls, but also went to paper doll conventions and became part of an international community of paper doll artists. She created new dolls and clothes, using vintage photos for her models and sometimes her cat. “I draw in pencil first to capture the person’s face,” she told Kellie Mazur for a profile in Buffalo magazine in January.
“Tracing paper is used to create the wardrobe. I lay it over the doll to get the right size and pose and then draw the costume to fit. It’s ultimately transferred to good paper.
“For coloring, I like using watercolor paints. It allows me to show more shadowing and detail. Some paper dolls can be rather flat, but that doesn’t interest me.
I prefer a painterly style.” It also provided the foundation for her other drawings, paintings and collages. She organized exhibits and gave workshops at Impact Artist Gallery in the Tri-Main Center from 1994 onward.
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