Introduction
MagicDolly is, simply put, my hobby. There isn't any fancy team or company behind it. It's just me, Dolly!
Just for a quick introduction, I've been an artist for about 11 years now. In 2018, my career really took off when I worked on several projects in Japan for Capcom and Cygames, creating for both the games and animation industry.
The 2020-2023 period was particularly difficult with the pandemic and the industry shifting so drastically. Long story short, it forced many artists like myself to adapt. I made the tough choice to look for opportunities in other industries to prepare for the worst.
The Origin of MagicDolly
Two years after changing industries, I started missing creating art. I still had my Wacom tablet and a Clip Studio Paint perpetual license, so I picked it back up as a hobby to design chibis. It started with just making stickers of my colleagues for fun! Eventually, I moved back to Photoshop and started developing my own custom tools.
In late 2025, my friends roped me into a mobile game called Umamusume. I created fan art of my favorite characters, and that's when MagicDolly was born on Etsy. I didn't think too hard about the name when I started - I just added the word 'Magic' in front of my nickname because pastel fantasy has always been my favorite genre. This website came a long way later.
Creating Emotes
I wasn't very good at certain expressions at first, and I made a lot of random characters as practice. As I got better, I started paying more attention to the details, gradually increasing the level of polish and the time I spent per set.
I've ended up remaking my older sets over time as I continue curating my collection. You can probably see a pretty big difference from when I first started to now. You'll see thumbs-up poses almost everywhere in the beginning because that's what I was most used to practicing!
Today, an emote set probably takes me anywhere between 4-6 hours on average to complete, though a few have gone past 10-12 hours. I've developed my own tools, scripts, and brushes, which really helps automate the more mundane parts of the process.
Ending
Creating emotes is just the beginning. There's still the arduous process of studying the market, setting the standard for showcasing my emotes, finding the optimal file sizes for delivery, not to mention the agonizing all-nighters I pulled to code and create this website! A lot was done behind the scenes to make the website smooth and intuitive - hundreds of micro-optimizations you probably wouldn't even notice - but I really hope you enjoy the experience here nonetheless.
If you've read this far, thanks for being a part of my journey. I've written a pretty long block of text here, haha. Just so you know, no LLM or GPT was used in writing this out! Not even to grammar check! This is all from the heart.
~ Dolly