Two more from the 1800s set from Liana’s Paperdoll Boutique…
By the time you all read this, I’ll be in Washington State visiting my family. But I intend to have lots of time for paperdolling again!
Here are some more from the 1800s set — bloomers and a rather fanciful ball gown. (I remember drawing that one: I ran out of paper.) Funny how the bloomers used to be so scandalous…
Thank you everyone for the kind thoughts about our dear Maggie. It was a horrible time for all of us and all your thoughtful comments really made me feel better about her. The apartment seems so much different without her trotting around… Harume seems as placid as ever (we don’t call her Goldfish Brain for nothing) but she’s become more vocal, always meowing over and over. She doesn’t seem sad, though, but just chatty, so I guess she’s all right.
I’ve had a half-finished dress for a while now, so I decided to restart the process with some Boutique gowns… These are from the 1800s (though when I drew them I didn’t make any finer distinctions of time, so I forget exactly when they are supposed to be from). I put them up in honor of the kind link from Jane Austen Today, and also because I just finished Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and regency gowns are on my mind. I actually remember exactly where I was when I was drawing the gowns in this set: working in the computer lab at Tri-C back in high school, a job which entailed fixing jammed printers, cleaning up and signing people in and out. So I could sit at the desk by the door and have some downtime to draw, and I just thought I had it made!
Our beloved cat Maggie had to go to the vet tonight at 1 AM, and the upshot may either be a pinched nerve or more serious damage. We’re pretty doting cat parents and very worried for her, so please keep us all in your thoughts today.
Here are some pictures of Maggie, leading off with everyone’s favorite:
Sitting on her perch with her head off the side in what we call “depressed teenager” mode.
Here with our other cat, Harume.
The early years.
Update (noon Sunday): she had a spinal fracture, and she’s no longer with us.
Click for larger version; click for the list of dolls.
This demure-seeming dress is actually not as innocent as one might think. It belongs to a videogame character named Cloud Strife; with each successive post-Final Fantasy VII appearance he makes, he becomes cooler and cooler. It’s as if to help us all forget that in FF7, rather shortly after you first meet him, you had to dress him up like a girl to gain access to the red light district. (The first time I played that part, I had my mom watching. Awkward.) Your female co-conspirators Tifa and Aeris have plunging necklines and bared arms in their chosen dresses, but with Cloud we are spared that vision…
FF7 has been on my mind recently on account of Brian starting to play it again, but our PS2 is now quite thoroughly kaput, and I don’t think he’ll have the heart to start it up again just to have it crash once more.
Click for larger version; click for the list of dolls.
So it turns out that Hulu has Some Like It Hot available for free, and I just had to watch it yesterday. Marilyn’s really good dresses have see-through parts, ruling them out for my paperdolls, but I liked this one that she wears near the beginning, even if I’m not quite sure I got the details right.
Click for larger version; click for the list of dolls.
This is based off of a dress that Janel made for her daughter’s birthday. After yesterday’s Calamity Jane, I needed to draw something extremely cute!
In my imagination, this version of the dress belongs to a young princess who loves pretty things, but isn’t prissy or as high-maintenance as a lot of princesses are these days. She loves being outdoors and she especially loves gardening. She’s growing tomatoes and wildflowers now, and she feels like she works hard to make her little garden grow, although that’s kind of a pleasant fiction created by the indulgent head gardener. I like her and would write more about her, but I didn’t finish this dress until it was late, and I’m tired, so she will have to wait for another dress…
If you remember a different shade of pink for this dress, it’s not just your imagination: when I first posted it, I posted the first version, which scanned very poorly (the color changed, I lost a lot of detail on the white parts, and so on). This version is closer to my original drawing.
Click for larger version; click for the list of dolls.
I’m listening to Deadwood Dick’s Doom, or, Calamity Jane’s Last Adventure, a dime novel western by Edward Wheeler. At three hours long I will probably be done with it by tomorrow, but if you like westerns or Deadwood, which I do, it’s an enjoyable three hours. The reading is a mite uneven, as with a lot of LibriVox books read by many readers, but overall it’s great, and some of the readers really put some life into it. I mean, how can you not love this line:
“Yes, I am Deadwood Dick, the celebrated cuss from Custer clime– the diabolical devil-may-care devotee of road-agency, from Deadwood the hunted hurricane, Harris, just as you see me. And according to a recent act of Congress, if you or any other two-legged individual attempts to harm yonder girl, whoever she may be, I’ll agree to furnish him with a free pass over Jordan by the most direct ethereal line. I mean business, so let some pilgrim of enterprising disposition open the market.”
Bullock couldn’t pull that off, but just imagine Swearengen chewing on it, preferably while waving around a pistol, even if the chivalrous sentiment isn’t quite his department…
Anyways, this is a drawing of Calamity Jane’s outfit, based off of this picture of her scan courtesy of this Calamity Jane site, Calamity Jane gets to show off in this book, putting a bullet through the neck of a bottle midair, but at the moment she’s in mortal peril. I’m not worried, though, Deadwood Dick has a 3 for 3 record of protecting helpless women, so far, and I predict that tomorrow she’ll be out of her predicament and back with him.
Click for larger version; click for the list of dolls.
I finished The House Of Mirth the other day, which I had been listening to (specifically this version, read by Elizabeth Klett). I love the book, and the reading was so well done, but… my chores really suffer when I’m listening to a depressing audiobook. When I have one that I can’t wait to return to, I do some dishes or take a walk just to have the excuse to listen to it, but when it’s one, like this one, where you can’t do anything but watch Lily Bart make bad choices, get humiliated and reach for that chloral, and you know what’s going to happen to her and you can’t skim to read faster, it is hard to listen to all twelve hours of it. It’s such a lovely book but oh, so sad…
This dress, then, is a reminder of happier times for Lily, when she triumphed in the tableaux, dressed and positioned as this painting of Mrs. Richard Bennett Lloyd (maiden name Joanna Leigh), painted in 1775 by Sir Joshua Reynolds. She was the hit of the evening: “She had shown her artistic intelligence in selecting a type so like her own that she could embody the person represented without ceasing to be herself. It was as though she had stepped, not out of, but into, Reynolds’s canvas, banishing the phantom of his dead beauty by the beams of her living grace.” There is so much description of character and so little description of physical characteristics in the book that it seems as if this is as close as we get to Lily herself…
The two best references I could find for this dress are this full picture and this detail. Since they’re not as large as I would like and you can’t see all the detail, the dress isn’t perfectly accurate. The sash is, I think, entirely wrong, but for the life of me I cannot figure out how the bunched-up green drapery at the back actually works as part of a dress. I studied it, I sketched it, I brought it into Photoshop and played with the levels and contrast and brightness and it just seems to me like a big clump of fabric stuck to her side, so I decided to turn it into a sash and not worry about it. So please don’t use this in your “House of Mirth” book report, and should you get a chance to see this painting in person, please don’t leave me a comment about how I didn’t get it right. Or if you do, at least take some pictures for me.
So, now I’m listening to Deadwood Dick’s Doom; or, Calamity Jane’s Last Adventure, which means that there are buckskins waiting for Sylvia and Iris…
Very interesting answers to the poll so far, by the way! I wonder how much it would have changed if I had had a “from Go Fug Yourself” option… I posted the link to the Bai Ling green and purple outfit in the first few comments of the final Fug Madness post, and I got a ton of traffic for that post…
Click for larger version; click for the list of dolls.
So when Jill saw my rendition of one of Min’s hats, she asked for me to do her Easter hat, a gorgeous confection (that Brian termed an “ultra-hat” — sorry) that she made to match her dress. That request has since been percolating in the back of my mind until I was reading her blog earlier and saw that she got robbed at a “Mad Hatter” contest.
Paperdolls always make a great consolation prize. In my world, anyways, where they also make good hobbies, gifts and eye candy.
If one was cutting this out, the hat would be cut underneath the brim, right underneath the broad green ribbon; on the large version I put a dotted line there. Krysti will have to tell us if it works anything like how I hope it does!
