Most art dolls live on a shelf. We wanted to know what happens if one could walk out of the room.
Like Art (https://like-art.com) is a marketplace for one-of-a-kind handmade art dolls, made by independent artists — mostly in Russia, where doll-making has been a serious craft for decades: polymer clay, baked and sanded by hand, painted in layers, sewn into silk and wool, then dressed in clothes that take longer than the doll itself.
A doll like that is a sculpture. It is not a toy, and it is certainly not a character in a game. Until now.
From clay to a walking character
Every doll that is accepted on Like Art can be turned into a 3D character. The artist uploads photographs of the finished piece, and we reconstruct it as a rigged model — same face, same scars and freckles, same hand-sewn dress — then give it a skeleton and eight animations so it can stand, walk, run, sit and idle in a browser scene.
That reconstruction is deliberately conservative. Our rule is that the 3D doll has to be recognisable as the same doll as the photograph: same silhouette, same palette, no generic plastic-looking face, no smoothing away the character that made someone fall in love with it in the first place. Artists review the model and can reject it.
The Doll World
Those characters then live in The Doll World — a 3D browser world, no install, that runs on a phone. It is a quiet place rather than a competitive one: you pick your doll, walk around, plant flowers in a garden, collect things, meet other people's dolls, and keep a small journal of what happened.
It is the closest thing we could build to the feeling of taking a doll out of the display case and letting it have a life of its own — except the life is shared with other collectors and with the artists who made the dolls.
You can walk in here (free, works in a browser):
https://like-art.com/v6/game.html?world=1&utm_source=mataroa&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=doll_world&utm_content=mata-1021
Why we are writing about it
Because the interesting part is not the technology, it is the loop: a person makes one object by hand, that object gets a digital twin, and the twin can be visited by someone on another continent who will never hold the physical piece. Collectors get to see a doll move. Artists get a second, animated portfolio that is not a photo.
We are a small team, the world is young, and we are building it in the open. If you make dolls, you can apply to have your work included. If you collect them, come and see whether the doll you are looking at on a shelf looks right when it walks.
Like Art — handmade toys with soul.
Written by the Like Art team. Dolls, artists and the 3D world: https://like-art.com