His first dolls were Santas, but he has since branched out into all kinds of character dolls. Artdolls, he calls them. There are violin players and cowboys. There are aviators and warriors. There are Victorian ladies and fishermen. There are Inuit sledders and teddy bear-makers. He was asked by Bob Marley's mother to make a doll of her late son.

His dolls are made of polymer clay with cloth body and fabric clothes. But he sometimes includes more than just the doll. A vignette with Mark Twain sitting in his home office is now in the Enchanted Mansion Museum in Baton Rouge, La. A vignette with Abraham Lincoln talking with a freed slave boy holding an American flag was done for Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and now sits in the Senate chambers in Washington, D.C. A "Norman Rockwell Triple Self Portrait" that recreates the Rockwell illustration of the artist looking in a mirror to paint his own picture is now in the Franklin Mint Gallery in Philadelphia, and was reproduced and sold as a limited edition by Franklin Mint.

"Attention to detail is what makes my dolls work," he says. "I tell my students that three things make a successful doll: It has to be gestured. It has to be good quality. And it needs exquisite detail. Detail makes all the difference in the world."

Faces are his favorite thing to work on. "They are not hard to do," he says. "Ears and hands are the hardest. The first year, I couldn't do hands, so all my dolls wore mittens."

The fact that they were Santas helped, he jokes. "But I realized that if I ever wanted to get to the next level, I had to make good hands. I don't think I was any good until I got to about my 150th pair."

Johnston's dolls, which are for collectors, not for play, typically sell for thousands of dollars. Doll collecting is huge these days. "Everyone has something they like to collect," he says, "for a lot of people, it happens to be dolls." They like the whimsey. They like the memories of childhood. They like the artistry.

"Every household has some kind of doll," he says, "but there are maybe half-a-million to a million serious collectors out there."

Many collectors have varied collections, "but there's one guy that has about 30 of my dolls. He has a room dedicated to Jack Johnston dolls."

Some of his dolls are also sold as prototypes to doll manufacturers, who then reproduce and sell the dolls.

Early on in his doll-making career Johnston discovered he had an affinity for and an enjoyment of teaching. "I travel around America teaching classes. I visit every state every year." He's on the road about 250 days a year, teaching and attending toy and craft fairs. He offers sessions at his North Salt Lake studio about four times a year.