All the Doctors. A Doctor Who Decorated Cookie Set

My brother is a fervent Doctor Who fan, and also at a recent birthday turned very old indeed. He's had Doctor Who cookies from me before, but this time I wanted to do something a little different. So I decided to do ALL the doctors on cookies. (Except Peter Cushing, who doesn't count because apparently he's actually a fictional film Doctor within the Doctor Who universe or some equally confusing nested reality scenario...).

So I put all monster images aside and turned to the problem of how to depict all the different Doctors, without ending up handpainting or mixing multiple colours until the end of time and space. Luckily, the design of the Doctors lends itself well to stylised versions. Their costumes, hair and so on are very recognisable, to the point of iconic. There are plenty of cartoon and stylised versions out there in fan art, but I wanted to create my own.

As a base for each Doctor I chose a simple rectangle, cutting the dough directly with a ruler and scalpel, with some microplaning after cooking to get clean straight edges. Then I agonised over what background they should all be on... until I fell upon the idea of recreating Tom Baker's scarf!

I chose the lightest colour of the scarf as a base flood, and once dry, painted them in the other colours. I sprayed the whole lot very gently in gold spray, to help smooth over the painted surfaces, and give them a bit of a metallic gleam.

I selected photographs of each doctor that I felt best lend themselves to being identifiable with fairly minimal piping work and colour mixing. Using my pico projector, I outlined the least amount I felt would allow the particular Doctor to be identifiable. Face, hair, hat if applicable, lapels, and other features. In general this worked well, though perhaps Capaldi looks like he's lost his trousers...

Whilst I did this directly from projections onto the cookies, from the original images, I've printed out an example (David Tennant) with dark outlining to show the basic principle. I didn't stick to the exact shapes, but made alterations to help the final, simpler image make sense.

 

Then I simply piped in the areas, grouping their hair colours into as white, blond, brown and black to minimise colour mixing, and I made these colours fit their coats too.

So which is your favourite? Though I love all the modern incarnations of the Doctor, it has to be the inimitable Tom Baker, of course! And here they all are, marching off across time and space...