Liana’s paperdoll blog

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So I’m a big Watchmen fan, and it is with some trepidation that I look towards the new movie. When the trailer came out I watched with joy that was dampened when Brian pointed out that everything looked really shiny and, well, essentially too polished and good; for example, the Night Owl of the comic carries a spare tire, who was this dude in a Night Owl costume looking so svelte? I liked to think that it was a flashback to the younger Night Owl, but I’m not so sure. The comic shows that a bunch of humans dressing up and fighting crime is probably not so cool as we might like to think it is; the movie is positioned to show that wow, it really is badass after all. Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised, we’ll see.

Of course, I am content to leave most of the obsessing about the content to Brian and the other fanboys and I turn to what I fangirl best, obsessing about the costumes. Already I can tell you I can’t forgive the new Ozymandias — that is, the dude on the far right of this Entertainment Weekly Watchmen cover. My Ozymandias dresses like wacked-out royalty, and it’s not meant to offer protection or hide his identity because he doesn’t need either. So we can get right past that and look at the girls. I’m torn about the original Silk Spectre (Sally Jupiter) — the paperdoll for today is based on her outfit in the comic book, and the new version is even more sexed up — particularly I think the stockings are too over-the-top for her times, although I do like that they connect her outfit to her daughter’s. I like the yellow part better in the movie version, though — very cute and feminine. The original stockings plus the original yellow top would be my favorite version. Laurie’s version of the Silk Spectre outfit I don’t like much, but I wasn’t really a fan of the original version either, so it’s a bit of a wash. I like the new design well enough on its own merits, actually, but I don’t think it fits the setting; Laurie’s mom picked out her costume for her, and her mom would have had an eye for what was sexy and showed off her daughter to best advantage. The movie version of the costume is significantly less soft and vulnerable looking — and really, probably more like what Laurie would have picked out for herself. But it’s too serious; Laurie wasn’t serious about the job of being a superheroine (one that her mom chose for her, essentially) until she was in her 30s.

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So Esmeralda got two votes from my call for non-Disney princess characters to draw in the “Jewels” collection style (and I’ve been convinced I must do something with Hyacinth Hippo, incidentally, but not today), so that makes her the winner. I decided that although I like her normal outfit, it was too practical to princessize, so I looked at the dress she wears to dance. In truth, my version is still not glitzed up enough to be a proper part of the Jewels line; if I was sewing a real dress, the proper next step would be to hand it to a team of 7-year-olds along with sequins, laces, a Bedazzler and ropes of pearls and let them go nuts. (I still can’t find any pictures online of the Jewels version of the Disney Princesses, so click here for a scan of my Kleenex box, showing Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Belle in full Jewels regalia, if a little water damaged. Now, you’ll see why I say mine is too plain — and why I think Sleeping Beauty is wearing a Venus fly-trap.)

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Here are two of the fantasy gowns from my old Boutique site. The blue and white one seems to have a sort of military character to it, to me, like a Valkyrie ballgown, and I like the red on the other one…

I’ve been thinking about what constitutes a “Princess” gown, mostly because the three-pack of Kleenex my husband brought home when we were sick includes one box with the Disney Princess girls on it. (He was pretty sick too at this point, I doubt he thought anything but “wife needs kleenex, kleenex exists in these boxes, these boxes are available for purchase, go go go”) All of them have had some significant wardrobe additions since the Princess line came out: I’ve seen these gold dress variations a few times, and the Kleenex box has something similar to that, although the dresses are the original colors. Everything else is changed: every inch of fabric that can have gold scrolls or ropes of jewels or lace and embroidery now does, and there are other embellishments such as jeweled capes, lacy ruffs, tiaras and more detailed sleeves. Sleeping Beauty’s looks like she’s got a Venus flytrap on her shoulders, in my opinion, and I wish I could find a picture of this so everyone could agree with me. The box says that it’s the newest Disney Princess collection, “Jewels,” but I can’t find any pictures.

Anyways, I must admit that it delights my inner 10-year old, but it made me think of some of Amy Mebberson’s Disney drawings of the characters that didn’t make the core Princess group cut, such as Kida and Eilonwy — here’s one of the “Non Princess Club and here’s Disney’s Forgotten Princesses So I thought it would be fun to draw a dress for one of the girls left out of the Princess club in this poofy Bedazzled “Jewels” style… I’m not going to post a poll since there are so many options, but leave a comment and tell me who you think should have their dress redone!

Looking at the Non-Princess Club, I think it’d be fun to do a dress from the Sprite from Fantasia, but I’m open to suggestions on this one…

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Sorry, sorry, I’ve been playing with my bike too much and not drawing enough, I know. But you see, as the new toy novelty wears off, I return to my Prismacolors…

I am reading Make Way for Lucia now, which is a collection of the Mapp and Lucia novels all in one doorstop-sized book. I listened to Queen Lucia first as an audiobook from Librivox, and then, since that book stops so abruptly, was dying to have more, more, more. Luckily there is more more more — Make Way for Lucia includes seven books total. They’re quite funny in a dry, snarky kind of way; as a matter of fact, it occurred to me more than once that it’s a shame the word “snark” itself wasn’t used in the 1920s, because there are so many places where a speaker says something described as “ironical” or “sarcastic” and the proper word can be only “snarky.” So far it is about a small English community and its queen bee, Lucia, and although living with the gossipy, snarky, hypocritical residents of Riseholme would be a sort of hell on Earth for someone like me, socially clueless hermit that I am, it’s delightful to read about it. The characters are mostly so quite dissembling, thoughtless and haughty that I rather hope that they get their comeuppance, and the author then kicks them around quite so thoroughly. So thoroughly, actually that I start to feel bad for them and hope they don’t get hurt too badly, even if it was coming to them, because their gossip and vanity is really all very harmless and none of them are bad, just silly. There’s a comparison to a Jane Austen novel here (especially because now I’m listening to Persuasion), if she was a shade more malicious and didn’t focus on romance.

Anyways, the main character is Lucia Lucas, who in Queen Lucia portrayed herself as a sort of refined lady born in the wrong age who worshipped Shakespeare and Beethoven and had a perfect horror of modern contraptions such as gramophones and London, and she contrived so that the whole town seemed to revolve around her. In the book I’m reading now, Lucia in London, she and her husband inherit money and property in London and suddenly her hatred of the city, modern art and music and so on simply vanishes. She even — oh my! — shingles her hair and wears short skirts. When I was listening to Queen Lucia I thought I should do an Elizabethan paperdoll outfit in deference to Lucia’s despising of modernity (and, also, to my inability to figure out when the book was set, my normal attention to details fixing a book in time quite baffled by Lucia’s quirks and Riseholme’s sleepiness), but now that she has gone to London I thought I had better get with the times as well.

The style doesn’t fit my poor Sylvia or Iris well, as they have no access to the kind of undergarments one would likely wear with such a dress, but oh well. It is based off of a McCalls pattern from 1927, which is when the book was published.

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For those of us in the USA - happy 4th of July! (And for those of you outside the USA, do enjoy the fourth of July anyways…) These are old 4th themed shirts (plus a pair of khaki capris) from the Boutique.

We haven’t seen any fireworks, but I might try to talk Brian into going to see the parade downtown…

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So I got a new Trek Wasabi. I haven’t had a bike in years, much less a good one, and I’m so excited about it. This is a really geeky bike; not geeky in the sense of “My new bike is perfectly aerodynamic and has fifteen thousand speeds” but more of like horribly cute and retro. (Brian thinks I’m crazy for getting a one-speed, but I don’t mind — I never could work gears well anyways, and we live in Ann Arbor, not San Francisco.) I’ve wanted a bike for a while, one that I would actually use and love, and I think Wasabi here fits the bill. I drew this dress based on Wasabi’s coloring and a rockabilly dress pattern from Damn Good Vintage.

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Brian and I went to go see Wall-E yesterday; these red jumpsuits are what the humans on board the Axiom wear. (And don’t forget, blue is the new red.) I don’t remember exactly how they look, and it’s impossible to find pictures of the humans, so it might be slightly off. I truly enjoyed it; it was less preachy and not as cruel about fat people as I had feared it might be. For one, it’s not as simple as “everyone would be better without any STUFF” — Wall-E treasured some of the things he found, using them creatively and learning from them. I don’t have a problem with too much stuff, myself — two moves in seven months will do that to you — so I didn’t go home with a burning determination to reduce my wasteful ways, although I do want to get my compost bin started… The heart of the story, of course, was Wall-E and Eve (and the other robots, too, were a lot more important than the humans — but I can’t very well make an Eve outfit, just cut out an oval, give her a monitor face and little blue eyes…) and that was really quite sweet. Brian, of course, nitpicked the mechanics of space travel, but that is Brian. The movie made me quite sad that the apartment landscaping people weed-whacked our growing flower bed that morning, but in the spirit of Encouraging the Green Growing Things, we went right back out and bought some more seeds…

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Yay, I’m recovering! I’m still coughing like crazy and tire out pretty easily, but I can taste things again and my ears are almost starting to be normal again. In celebration, a couple of the paperdoll pets from the old Boutique. The dragon was sort of a mascot for a while, too, gracing the front page, while the brown critter is a baby rat creature from the comic book Bone.

So I was looking at my blog stats today and noticed a new blog, and the paperdoll website done by the blog’s owner. Annissa, I had no idea you drew such wonderful paperdolls! You all have got to take a look at them. The newest set is based on flowers and is fabulous (I love the Iris dress the best). And look - she has a whole book’s worth of clothes for Sense and Sensibility. My favorite, of course, is Princess Liana. I wish I could read her stories! There are a lot of other sets, too, with beautiful details and designs. You can use Google Translate to get an idea of the text; the translation software isn’t really accurate, but it gives you an idea of what the sets are about.

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For Annissa! :)

I’m still a little sick, so it’s not the best one I’ve ever done, but it’s a good start on the path to doing a paperdoll every day again… Anyways, this is a redrawing of one of the 1800s regency gowns I did for the Boutique. I must have based it off of something, but it was ten years ago, I have no idea what it was based on…

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I’ve been sick with bronchitis and ear infections since the 13th. As it is now the 23rd, and I am just now getting to the point where I feel better, if I don’t stand up and move around too much, and I may have to go to the doctor again tomorrow if this annoying bubble in my ears doesn’t go away, well, I am a little grumpy about the whole thing. Brian (who caught it from me just in time for Startup Weekend, the poor thing) and I have gone through bottles and bottles of ginger ale and I am quite thoroughly sick of Amy’s no-chicken noodle soup. Worst of all, my classes got reorganized since I was out for so long. I feel depressed and adrift and desperately unhappy, which is hard enough to feel without adding congestion, a persistent cough, ear infections and fatigue.

For Anna I drew a couple of evil fairy outfits when I was feeling down about things, which turned out to be some of my favorites from that series, so I thought it would be therapeutic to draw one for this series too. This fairy spreads illness and disease, and as you can see she is rather less restrained by her clothes than malice or bad luck. She’s quite efficient, beautiful in that consumptive way, and very fond of hideous shades of green. She seems to visit me more often than I would like. Maybe if I picture her and put such energy in her beloved shades of puce and chartreuse it will appease her, and then I can wake up refreshed, breathe deeply and take a nice, long walk.