The Portrait Doll Series explores the doll as portrait. JD Beltran first constructed a self-portrait doll, seen in the artwork at the top right Playing with Myself wherein she painted the doll's face to more closely resemble her own face, including her blue glasses, and dressed it in the outfit she generally wore every day. She also constructed a series of other portrait dolls wherein she painted the faces of her close friends Jeannie, Perry, and Jason on dolls that resembled subjects in iconic oil portraits by the old masters, for example Thomas Gainsborough's Blue Boy, or Diego Velazquez's Infanta Margarita.
The dollfaces are painted meticulously, in oil on a gessoed surface, in the manner of an old master's painting. All of the portrait dolls are dressed in hand sewn costumes with fabric, trim, and structure identical to that of the painting that was their inspiration. The final artworks are not the dolls themselves, but large format saturated color photographs of the dolls in various poses, printed in medium and large formats. The artwork of the three dolls in cellophane, Untitled (Mastercopies Series: Perry as a Velasquez, Jeannie as a Van Dyke, and Jason as a Gainsborough ) was featured in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art exhibition "The Darker Side of Playland: Childhood Imagery from the Logan Collection" curated by Heather Whitmore Jain.