Sorry for missing yesterday – the time went past a lot quicker than it’s supposed to. There is a chance I won’t post tomorrow, but that is because I want my masquerade series to be great and I don’t want to rush it… We’ll see, wish me luck. If I don’t post tomorrow, you have this black and white masquerade gown to keep you company…

The elf dress coloring was suggested by Monica, who guessed my favorite warm color to be Sunburst Yellow (it’s in there, actually, in the gold part). Hope you like it! As before, I’ll color the masquerade dress to the order of whoever guesses this week’s question, and it’s kind of a strange one…
I learned my technique for coloring gold (fabric, metal) a while back, when I tried copying a costume from a specific singer or musical group. Which singer / musical group was it?
Not giving you any more clues than that… One guess per person please!

Leaving the poll on the LOTR costumes up a little longer…

I didn’t really intend to return to elves for the last day of this series… I wanted to do an Entwife with an orange blossom theme, but I got started too late and my patience with making a dress out of leaves and bark just ran out. You can always tell when I just want to get done for the day, because the dress will be white. No matter how crazy and detailed it ends up, if it’s white, it usually means I started out in a grumpy mood.

Galadriel doesn’t get a lot of description besides “white,” making her good to paperdoll on a grumpy day. I really rather like how this gown turned out, although if I was to redo it I would probably cut off the gauzy middle layer of material on the sleeves.

That makes my seventh costume for Halloween: a whole week of Lord of the Rings, all finished. Uh, those of you who have followed me for a while (like, for more than a week) may have figured this out already, but it’s slightly rare for me to finish up a project so well and consistently: it’s usually one or the other. (See also my poor dancing princesses…) I’m rather proud of myself. Since I don’t think masquerade gowns are likely to be upset at this late hour, I’m putting up a new poll just to satisfy my own curiosity… It’s rather unfair to pit the black and white elf dress against the others, because I think it’ll be lovely when it’s colored, but oh well.

I’m amazed that the first week is almost over… I’m very much looking forwards to next week. I’ve got an idea for next week, and that often means trouble…

Anyways, today we have a dress based off of Goldberry’s initial description in the Fellowship of the Ring. She’s described as wearing a green gown with silver “like beads of dew,” and a belt of gold in the form of flag-lilies with forget-me nots. And as her arms are described as white, I decided she didn’t need any sleeves… So this is just my interpretation of her costume, and if I could have just about anything I’ve drawn as a real costume, I think this might be it. It’s even prettier on the paper, I wish you all could see…

As always, vote in the poll if you haven’t yet… Have I ever gotten this many poll responses before? It’s almost up to 300.

For tonight, here is my version of a female wizard. (My husband called her “Gwendolf” and the name stuck. My apologies.) None appear anywhere in the series, but it is for Halloween and I thought it would be fun… And it was fun, even if I used up a year’s worth of French Grey pencils, even if the end result is a little boring.

My husband heard me complaining and warns me “You should watch out. You don’t call wizards boring. They’ll transform you into a little toad!” I should not like to be transformed, into a toad or otherwise, and so I added cute little hem designs and dialed down the criticism of the grey. If I was sticking to canon I could have given her a blue hat, but the more I look at it, the more I think, well, she looks kind of cool in her desaturated glory… Actually, playing around with hue/saturation in Photoshop, I can make “Gwendolf the Off-White,” “Gwendolf the Lime Green” oh and you don’t want to see “Gwendolf the Electric Blue,” trust me…

I’m afraid this one is going up a little late tonight, but it’s still the 8th where I am. So far I think I’m doing better than last year in terms of paperdoll consistency.

There’s not much reason to put up the poll today too, but I might as well. Don’t worry, fairy fans, I would place money on them taking the third week, if I was a betting sort of gal…

So, as I’ve discussed here before, my mom and I would doubtless be hobbits if we were in this world. I did start reading the Fellowship of the Ring again, and I’ve just finished all the Shire stuff; aside from all the stuff about who was whose third cousin twice removed, which I am quite sure I would forget entirely, it sounds like my kind of place. We might admire the elves from a distance, but at the end of the day I’ll take the hobbit-hole and frequent presents…

Now, my paperdoll is built a little more like an elf or human, and you will have to draw the hair on the tops of her feet yourself, but she still gets a hobbit dress because hobbits are fun. And they like green! Yes, I’m so there.

Poll is still going… fairies could still take it all, but I hope not because I would love to do a week of lavish masquerade gowns… is it bad of me to influence the voting?

So I’m not quite sure how I feel about this one. It turned out rather differently than I had wanted it to — I was going for more of a delicate dawn — and I guess my perception of elves is influenced enough by the movies that it seems all wrong. You know, where are the muted earth tones? The fine leaf patterns? The soft, understated fabrics? I can almost imagine an elf mama asking her daughter if she’s quite sure that’s what she wants to wear out to the moon-viewing tonight, and if maybe this nice moss green gown wouldn’t be better? Rebellious elves in magenta, yes, I like that, and even though I played with it some in Photoshop, taking down the saturation and adjusting the colors, in the end I couldn’t do it: I had to present it just as I drew it, brazen coloring and all. If my elf girl doesn’t fit in with the Rivendell crowd, I am sure there is some anime out there she can escape to where she can be happy.

My quiz must have been too easy… The answer was Sunburst Yellow. Unlike Ultramarine, Sunburst Yellow gets used really heavily in almost every yellow or gold thing I draw, and it’s such a cheery, vibrant color that it makes me smile every time I pick it up. So Monica, think about how you want me to color yesterday’s dress and post in the comments please!

Poll is still going… please vote if you haven’t already!

Today’s costume is intended to be a dress for an elf, just something to lounge around and do elfish things in, whatever elves do with their time. (Nope, I haven’t yet started reading the trilogy again, can you tell?) I’m not quite sure how I like this one, but I think with the right coloring it could be really pretty… Well, hopefully whoever guesses this round’s quiz answer has good taste!

I really like Arwen’s dresses, but it seems like my three favorites – the red and blue one, the blue-grey one and the green coronation gown – are so close in construction to each other that if I did a similar style it would feel so much like I was just plain ripping it off. Yeah, the style is pretty enough, and basic enough, that maybe I will rip it off just a little anyways… just once…

As for the 1885 ball gown, Catie asked me to color it in light and dark blue, gold and red for the flowers… I like the way it turned out, I hope you like it Catie! For this week… sorry, I’m not feeling too creative…
What’s my favorite warm Prismacolor?
“Warm” being defined here as red, orange, yellow or pink… so there’s a big clue already, right? Please post your guess in the comments, first to guess it can tell me how to color today’s gown!

The poll for next week’s theme is still open, please vote if you haven’t yet!

So! Today officially starts day one of my Halloween costume month extravaganza. I foresee a lot of elves in my future, but I like Eowyn and couldn’t help but start with something she might wear. The dress isn’t intended to represent any specific costume from the movie – as much as I like the movie costumes, I won’t just be reproducing them all week because that would be boring – but it is vaguely based on this white gown that I loved.

I will try to re-read as much as I can of the Lord of the Rings trilogy this week, but keep in mind I’m not a LOTR geek in the same way that I am, say, a Final Fantasy geek. My mom tried to get me to read The Hobbit when I was younger, and it didn’t hold my interest until I was older for some reason. Although I have read the LOTR trilogy too, of course, it really has been quite some time. So if I draw an elf dress in some specific shade of purple that the Silmarillion says is reserved for mourning a nephew or something please do forgive me.

Here’s the poll for week 2 of Halloween costume possibilities. I dropped the bottom three results from last week, added the suggestions from yesterday’s post and added one of my own… Please vote!

I’m afraid my dolls generally aren’t cut out for the straight lines that make 1920s fashion look so good, but I did a 1922 dress anyways because I just finished listening to The Adventures of Sally by P.G. Wodehouse, read by Kara Shallenberg. Romantic comedy isn’t so much my thing, but it was amusing (and I often listen to audiobooks while doing things like washing dishes, so amusing beats edifying in terms of audiobook content). And of course Wodehouse is Wodehouse, so it was a fun little portrait of the character of everyone involved. Sally, who of course is the main character, comes into an inheritance early on, so I imagine she went out and bought a couple new dresses, and because everyone spends the rest of the book falling madly in love with her I suppose that they were properly cute.

I really like the idea of doing four main themes for October costumes – give me suggestions and I’ll put up a poll closer to October. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, do see the entry for September 4th.

As for my colored pencil guessing game, no one has hit on the exact number yet…

I’ve had the second Narnia movie recommended to me a couple times because of the costumes, and finally Brian and I got it from the library and watched it. I sort of made Brian watch it with me, mostly because he’s so funny when his picky English major nature is all riled up.

He says “You didn’t make me watch it with you. I volunteered. It’s true that people often volunteer to make bad decisions, but I volunteered. I enjoyed it, except for those times where characters were talking, or moving, or engaging in eight-hour long bloodless swordfights. I also enjoyed watching Susan throw arrows into the hearts of warriors.”

So there you have it, the Brian review. I liked it better than he did (I like just about everything better than he does) but I too am not thrilled by the creepily sanitary fight scenes. Not that I want to see bleeding battle elks and warriors or anything, just that in the books the fights seemed to me important and unavoidable, but also not so glorified. I like the books where the fights aren’t the focus, like the Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and I’d add A Horse and His Boy which is my favorite, but I fear when they get around to that one about half of the time will be spent on the fight scene at the end. It reminds me of the Watchmen comics’ ambivalence about violence and the movie’s celebration of the same.

I did enjoy the costumes, of course! I’ve always envisioned the clothes of Narnia as being comfy and practical as well as beautifully made and graceful, and I can’t quote chapter and verse but I’m quite sure that there’s more than one part in the Chronicles where Lewis rails against stuffy, confining clothing, often preferring rather pagan garb. (There’s just enough costume description and scope for imagination in the books that I’ve often thought of doing a Narnia paperdoll series…) I especially liked the split skirts over flowing pants that Lucy and Susan wore, so I borrowed the idea for today, although it looks more like a plain old overskirt and underskirt combo if you didn’t know what it was supposed to be.

In other paperdoll news, I’ve figured out what colors to use so that I can take one hair style and change it in Photoshop to make a bunch of different hair colors. It’s not as easy as it sounds, unless you like really tacky yellow instead of blonde. So far I have ten realistic hair colors and eleven rainbow colors (those are, of course, easier to do!). Do me a favor and look at the hair colors and tell me what you think of them. If you have any suggestions as to what other colors I should try to do, I’d love to hear them (and if you have any reference pictures, that’d be great too). I think I’ve got more than enough blond colors and I need more shades of brunette.