Web Video / Dollightful

"Annyeong! Welcome to Dollightful!"

Dollightful is a YouTube channel run by Katherine, a doll collector and customizer who's based in South Korea (though Katherine herself is from the United States).

Most of her videos are showing how she makes a specific custom doll, along with how-tos for getting started in doll customising, making doll armour, and sewing doll clothes. She makes original doll designs and ones based on pre-existing characters.

The channel can be found here.

---

Tropes appearing in Dollightful:

• Action Girl: A lot of them, especially the dragons.
• Amazing Technicolor Population: A result of many dolls having inhuman skin tones. A standout example is her Eeveelution series, where only Eevee herself has what could be considered a natural skin color. Oh, and also her dragons series.
• Artifact Title: Lampshaded. She mentions how she puts "Repaint!" in the title and thumbnail of her videos, even though she now does so much more per video than repaint the doll, sometimes even making entirely new dolls from scratch. She did drop it for the fully custom crow artdoll video, however.
• Author Avatar: A doll known as ‘Mini-Katharine’ features in video intros and endings, as well as skits.
• Book Ends: She starts and ends each video with the Korean phrase "Annyeong!" ^note  Annyeong means either hello or goodbye depending on context.
• Boyish Short Hair: Sylveon and Jade both sport pink pixie cuts, though in Jade’s case hers is closer to the scalp.
• Brick Joke: Near the end of Aurora's episode, Katherine attempts to make miniature potion bottles with resin, but the first mold she makes ends up having too narrow of a neck to get much resin in. So, she sets the molds aside and tries again. Come the end of the episode, she opens the molds and shows what the failed potion bottles ended up looking like, complete with the losing bell from The Price Is Right.
• Bunnies for Cuteness: A secondary theme of Irene Oxide, with her copper rabbit mask and abundance of pompoms in her accessories. Jade also wears a Lolita coat with a bunny hood.
  • Taken further with her custom ball-jointed bunny doll, which is a baby blue rabbit.
• Caption Humour: A frequent feature of the customisation videos, mostly little snippets of dry wit sometimes coming from the dolls themselves (most notably Nova near the end of her creation, as Katherine discusses the chosen name of the doll).
• Camp Gay: Juwon, a harajuku character made as part of a collaboration for pride month comes off as this as he's dressed in the Japanese decora Kei style overloaded with rainbow colors. Because Katherine used a Clawd Wolf doll from Monster High, the video has received many positive comments praising her for making an LGBTQ character as a person of color. If that weren't enough, half of the comments are fans asking for Juwon to have a boyfriend. And as of mid-September, he does: Tatsuo.
• Catchphrase: Katherine signs off each episode with "Stay artsy! Annyeong!"
• Celestial Body: Currently two of them exist as part of different doll series:
  • Nova of the Stock Box series was created with a 'Galaxy' theme, the first chosen by fans. Her body is a mix of dark blue and purple, dotted with dozens of stars.
  • Nyx, the first official dragon of the Dragon series, has a similar colour palette, with multiple constellations stitched into her wings.
• Clip Show: The "Doll Customizing Out of Context" episode. Justified, since Katherine was on maternity leave at the time, but still wanted to post something.
• Covert Pervert: In Tatsuo's video, when the original Jackson Jekyl base is presented, it's not wearing any pants. Most of the other dolls look away in shock and horror (while Ty Tanium tells him to get some pants), but Amanita stays in the same curious, vaguely flirty pose. Probably just an oversight, but it adds to the scenein a humorous fashion.
• Crossover: Has one with Hextian where they exchange designs and make dolls in each other's style. Also the Valentine's Day special where she makes Sylveon.
  • She also took part in a Lolita-Swap Hosted by Retro Dolls US, where she created Charlotte Copperchain.
  • Also a massive one with 10 other doll artists for Halloween 2017, where she made a banshee.
  • She took part in two for June 2018, the first one Steampunk-themed with 7 other doll artists, where she made Irene Oxide, and a Pride-themed one with 4 others near the end of the month, where she made Juwon.
  • Exaggerated in July of 2019, where she decided to host a collaboration with her viewing audience to create a doll in a month's time under a 'tropical' theme. She managed to receive over 4,000 responses, and her video which presents them all is a whole hour long, even with 4-way split screen between the submitted photos.
• Easter Bunny: During the spring season, she made a custom ball-jointed rabbit doll and appropriately set it in cute, Easter-esque sets.
• Elemental Powers: Freya, the dragons, and the Eeveelutions.
• Gag Dub: Katherine made one ^note Skip to the 1:27 mark as a protest of COPPA threating channels that could be "for kids". She says "I could make my content more mature" - the result is a Gag Dub of her Aurora customization complete with Cluster Bleep-Bomb and her laughing during the "wine break" segment.
• Goth: Tatsuo, the 6th stock box doll, was created with this as his theme. He has lots of tattoos and an all-black outfit, coupled with a very angsty demeanour unlike that of most other dolls.
• Graceful Ladies Like Purple: Espeon has purple hair and wears a matching ao dai and shawl. Macaroon also has partly purple hair and a lavender dress.
• Horned Humanoid: Wendy the Wendigo, Yuliya the reindeer, Xerneas, Theia Thriftford, and Ember all have prominent horns in their designs. Wendy, Yuliya, and Xerneas have large antlers, while Theia has a pair of sheep horns, and Ember has demon horns.
• Improbably Female Cast: As a result of doll availability, the vast majority of dolls are female characters.
• Kind Hearted Cat Lover: Katherine has three black and white cats that often appear in each episode. Their names are Junpyo (the mostly black cat), Soko (the older black and white cat with green eyes), and Pinto (the youngest cat with orange eyes).
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: The Halloween 2022 special assumes you already know that the Goat Man is Ember's father by saying the family will be completed by making her mother.
• Nature Spirit: Leafeon, Xerneas, Iggy, Amanita, and Terra.
• Odd Couple: There are photos of Cupcake the candy-themed doll and Wendy the Wendigo sharing doughnuts.
• Opposites Attract: Tatsuo and Juwon are a couple.
• Our Demons Are Different: Three so far, both from Halloween Collaborations.
  • First, the Demon Girl made for the 2018 Halloween Collaboration. A goat-hoofed gal with a design clearly made with Hot as Hell in mind, who conjures a portal to the Underworld in her first appearance.
  • The second from the 2019 Collab is the Goat Man, a much more beastly creature with horns attached to a mask that hides his face. And he's the father of the Demon Girl above.
  • The most recent addition is Zura the succubus from the Halloween 2022 collab.
• Pink Is Feminine: Katherine has a penchant for pink and it shows in Sakura, an all pink doll.
• The Pollyanna: Sometimes, doll customs go seriously wrong, but Katharine stays cheerful and finds a way to fix it.
• Poorly Disguised Pilot: An unintentional one with the Sylveon doll, which started off as a one-off Valentine's Day video and ended up starting the Eeveelutions series.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: In addition to materials not behaving as planned, the customs are limited to what kind of base dolls are available, which means that, among other things, male customs are less common.
• Rose-Haired Sweetie: Sylveon, Macaroon (though her hair is only half pink) and Zephie. Tatsuo himself may look like a member of the yakuza, but he has pastel-pink hair and is paired with bright and colorful Juwon. As of 2020, Dollightful's current mini me doll also has short pink hair to mirror Katherine's.
• Rummage Sale Reject: This sort of look was incorporated into a couple of dolls:
  • Theia Thriftford, the Budget Custom example doll, has this look incorporated into her design, with chaotic inclusions of various fabrics into her clothes and hair to complement the 'thrifty' nature of her creation.
  • Silvally possesses a medieval armour spin on this trope, with a mix of armour pieces present to achieve the theme of the original Pokemon.
• Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: A variant — her arch-nemeses are doll eyebrows.
  • For a while (until Katherine herself became more accustomed to the medium), resin.
• Spotlight-Stealing Squad: The Eeveelutions stole the show during the months of their creation, with few other dolls being produced. However, this ended with the miniseries itself.
• Steampunk: Not a main feature of most of her dolls, compared to her preference of sweets themed ideas, but she does have a handful of very well designed steampunk dolls. Most of them were made via an external decision so far, and often mix in secondary elements into each design. These are Charlotte Copperchain (part of a lolita-themed swap, for Anastasia Customs, who has a preference for steampunk in her own work), Ty Tanium (voted for as the 3rd instalment of the Stock Box series), and Irene Oxide (part of a steampunk-themed collaboration).
• The Stinger: Almost all of her videos end with a funny and/or cute video of her cats.
• Succubi and Incubi: Zura, from the Halloween 2022 collab, is a purple succubus. She's also Ember's mother.
• Theme Naming: The dolls in her dragon series (Aurora, Nyx, Zephie, Terra, Aquarien, and Phoenix) have names from Greco-Roman mythology.
• Trademark Favourite Food: Wendy likes doughnuts even more than human flesh.
• True Blue Femininity: Vaporeon and Seyshelle are two dolls that are primarily blue. Katharine described her idea for Vaporeon's personality as 'the model' of the Eeveelutions group in her overview video, while Seyshelle is the only stock box doll whose main outfit is a full length dress, taking inspiration from the sea.
• Two Girls to a Team: The Eeveelutions are a genderbent example: There are two male dolls, Umbreon and Jolteon, despite in-game Eevees And Eeveelutions being overwhelmingly male.
• The Ugly Guy's Hot Daughter: Ember (the demon girl from 2018’s Halloween video) is revealed to be the daughter of the goat man.
• The Vamp: Lilith Von Croix.
  Katherine: You know it's a Hextian design when the make-up is sharp enough to kill a man.