Halloween Costume Series Bonus: The Vampire’s Black and Purple Regency Ballgown with Black Lace and Silver Sash

Click for larger version; click for the list of dolls.

Now, I like the Good Queen as much as anyone, but the vampire always was one of my two favorites ever since she was drawn. (The other was the gypsy girl, who didn’t make it into the finals even though she has the cutest embroidery on the hem of ther skirt.) So the Good Queen took an early lead, but the vampire was always close behind, catching up right near the end, and when I got back from Thanksgiving festivities she had won with a respectable lead, 28 votes to 22 (with Undead Marie in third place with 15 and Christine last with 12). I think the Good Queen must be furious, but as promised, here’s a victory gown for the vampire.

I saw her gown as being an undefined Regency style, so here’s a ballgown in the same vein (I’m sorry, I can’t help myself). I don’t think it’s nearly as good as the first one, but it’s not bad. I’m tempted to do extra outfits for all of the finalists, as I’ve become quite fond of them, and now I have a proper pencil sharpener I bet a good ghostly court dress would be fuuuuun, and not the slog that Undead Marie’s gown was.

Smoke Grey and Pink Butterfly Gown by Charles James via A Dress A Day

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This dress is based on one of Charles James’ “Butterfly” evening gowns, although I’m not thrilled about how it turned out. Erin from A Dress A Day linked to an ivory, fall-colored version as an example of her dream dress, and I really like this smoky, pink version. I’m thinking about Erin and her blog today because recently she wrote about a new book Outliers: The Story of Success, condensing it into a sentence: ten thousand hours of work will make you an expert in your field, and it has little to do with being “naturally talented.” That, of course, made me wonder what percentage of that I’ve already gotten through. I estimate I spend one to four hours on each new blog post I make here. For example, the Metafilter dress probably took about an hour, because it’s a very simple design, the post itself is mostly a collection of links, and I wanted to get that sucker posted while the posting was good, not three days later when my Metafilter traffic was all gone. Something more complicated like my version of the Star Princess dress? Probably three hours to sketch out and settle on a design, finish the drawing and write the post; that’s not including the time I spent looking at other web sites to see what other versions looked like. For simplicity’s sake, I think I can average it out to about two hours per post. Between this blog, the 2004 one, the Boutique and all the other paperdoll related things I’ve done, I think I can safely say I’ve put in 800 - 1000 hours towards my 10,000.

I’ve been thinking about success in this way for a little while; I’m used to skating by on natural talent, things I already know and short bursts of inspiration, and keeping up with a project consistently feels very unnatural to me. (Although the Boutique was up for a couple of years, I updated it in bursts, not one a day like I try to do now.) It was actually zefrank’s the show that helped me see value in long-term approaches. He did a short video blog for a year, one every day, writing songs, making jokes, inviting his audience to participate, and some of his videos were OK, a lot of them were great, and a couple of them sublime. My style was usually to do something great in a rush, with all my attention, then to be done with it. (Or as I told one of my friends, I do my best work in the grip of an obsession.) the show was really Brian’s thing more than mine, but I certainly took this away from it: a new video every day for a year, even if it wasn’t the best, delivered a greater impact than ten wonderful videos alone. Ten wonderful paper doll outfits, I can do that easily if I’m in the right mood. Beyond that, it gets hard.

A new paper doll outfit every day isn’t easy for a perfectionist. You all see the cute ladybug costume, I see “wow, one of those shoulder thingies is so much bigger than the other, and the lace is so sloppy, and why didn’t I put in the red first and draw in the black dots later, instead of smearing the black into the red parts and getting the shiny part all messy?” But at last count 11 of you voted for it as your favorite. Wow. Someone like me has to stop and think about that, because it doesn’t make sense from my perfectionist perspective. It says to me, this is a good approach, that that ladybug costume was created and I learned from it and someone likes it, and that makes it OK.

I’ve got a lot yet to learn in my remaining 9,000 hours — how to draw humans, obviously, and their annoying hands and feet, how to make fabric look right, how to get the most use out of my 160-some colored pencils and how to draw delicate seafoam and seaweed to wrap around my mermaids. It feels like it’s going to take a while, but hey! I’m only 26. Hallelujah, it’s a brand new day (a-chicka quack quack)

This poll ends the 21st, so do get your vote in. I’m so curious if Miss Daae will pull through with the win, if the dark horse ladybug will be ahead or if my gypsy girl will have some good luck for once.

Colorblock Mini Dress (inspired by the Metafilter colors) with White Go-Go Boots

Click for larger version; click for the list of dolls.

Hello Mefites! Wow, this very well may cure me of just abandoning my site for a few weeks…

Anyways, for those of you who aren’t Metafilter readers, it’s a community blog for the “best of the web,” and someone posted a very thorough writeup of my paperdoll blog. Metafilter being no trifling little site, my traffic has gone something like this: plodplodplodplodWHEEEEEEEEE. I’ll post a picture later.

For those of you just arriving, I thought I’d point out some of my favorites that the writeup didn’t mention:
I did twenty outfits for my Halloween Costume Series, some of which are my favorite things that I’ve ever drawn. (My mom really likes the first one, the Good Queen’s Ghost, but she wants to give it a good washing.)

One of my mermaids was linked to from the Metafilter post, but there are many more. My favorite, of course, is the wedding mermaid, although she throws people searching for mermaid-style wedding dresses for a loop.

For some reason, my drawings of Princess Garnet’s white gown and Princess Ashe’s Wedding Dress (from FFIX and FFXII, respectively) both turn up very high in a Google image search for either of the two characters; Ashe’s wedding dress is my site’s single most popular image. I’m glad, then, that they turned out reasonably well, unlike Cloud’s dress, which I will probably redo before the end of the year.

I have been known to do nice things for people who link to me. Hint, hint.

This is just the tip of the paperdoll iceberg; I have a whole other series of paperdolls from earlier in my life. (The Boutique paperdolls that I’ve been putting up are even older than that, too…)

Thank you for visiting, and I hope you enjoy the site!

Two Halloween Costumes (Princess and Cat) from Liana’s Paperdoll Boutique

Click for the doll.

So, I do all my drawings with Prismacolor colored pencils, and I almost always use a special pencil called the colorless blender for the finishing touch. Essentially it smooths the colors together; sometimes it makes the colors vibrant, sometimes it makes color gradients look perfect, sometimes it actually changes the colors. It’s what makes mermaid tails so pretty, basically. And mine wore down to a little pencil stub, and I thought I had a replacement but I don’t. (I think I need to start buying them by the bushel.) So for tonight I’m just going to put up some more Boutique costumes and tomorrow go and get another blender pencil or two so I can continue the paperdoll outfit I was working on. Anyways, here we have a princess costume and a cat costume. Tonight’s costume was to be a princess gown, actually, but then I ran out of colorless blender… look forwards to it tomorrow!

I made a new poll:

Plurk Paper Dolls with costumes, memes and renowned computer geeks

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You may have heard of Twitter, the latest way for web 2.0 types to revolutionize the world, and what I use for off-the-cuff paperdoll updates, over on the sidebar. I also started using plurk, which is similar but has better organization and makes it easier to carry on conversations. (Twitter now is just paperdoll stuff while plurk is more “here’s what I’m making for dinner,” but feel free to visit my Plurk stream.)

Anyways, Plurk had a design contest recently, so I drew up this one-off paperdoll that uses three of the “plurk creatures,” Plurk’s creepy-cute mascots. Besides the Halloween costumes, the other sets have a more geeky bent to them. Top left, you’ll find three memes that geeks have obsessed over to ridiculous levels: Portal’s Weighted Companion Cube, CATS from Zero Wing, famous for the All Your Base dialogue, and Twitter’s failwhale, the image that signals the site is down. Bottom left, there’s Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder, Steve Jobs, Apple co-founder, and Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo’s “father of modern video games.” (His outfit was taken from this BusinessWeek article because it was so cute.)

Sadly, I didn’t win the contest with my little plurky paperdolls, so I’ll have to buy the book I wanted, McGee & Stuckey’s Bountiful Container, with my own money after all. Still, even if I didn’t win the contest, I at least have something for my blog today!

Dragon Pet and Rat Creature Pet from Liana’s Paperdoll Boutique

Click for the doll.

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.

Blonde Paperdoll with Blue Morning Glory Ballgown circa 2000

Click for the doll.

Faith asked me to post — I think — this doll and her outfits. (I don’t think I did any others that fit the bill, is this the right one?) I drew her towards the end of the Paperdoll Boutique era, sometime in 2000. (Those butterfly clips were real cool when I was in high school.) My intention was to start off by redrawing all of the boutique dresses for her. Hah! Yeah, I got real far on that one. This is the “sneak preview” version, so I left in the text I added.

She never would have made a good mermaid, but she did have a handful of outfits — which is actually where I run into trouble. You see, I have a way of storing data on my computer that makes my husband cry. (Example: one of the most precious files on my computer is stored in nested folders named like so: Liana -> Projects -> Liana-old -> Text -> tempjunk. Why? I couldn’t tell you.) I’ve got zip files with unexplained names, and who knows how many files that open with programs I haven’t had for years. I like to pretend that someday I’ll sort everything out, but in reality I’m going to have to write in my will: “Burn my computer upon my death, it’s beyond redemption.” So, I know the rest of her outfits are there on my computer somewhere, because I’ve seen them within the past three months. But I don’t remember how I found them, and I couldn’t find them today. I’ll post them when I do find them, though.

Brian says he’ll help me find them, so all is not lost. “I’ll create a GUI using Visual Basic to see if we can track an IP address,” he says.

I’m sorry I haven’t been posting — I’ve been busy with some other things, and a little nervous about my new job, which I start tomorrow (teaching ESL classes). I should actually have some time once things calm down, though…

Random Liana trivia: morning glories are my favorite flower.

A Paperdoll Dress Made Entirely Out Of Tabs (for my husband)

Click for larger version; click for the list of dolls.

Thanks to Brian for putting together my April Fool’s joke yesterday. I’m, er, back from my ninja duties. (My mom couldn’t believe I was a ninja. That is why I’m such a very good ninja.)

As thanks to my darling husband, I made him a dress he’s always wanted me to do: a paperdoll dress made ENTIRELY out of tabs. I think you all are lucky that he actually isn’t taking over for me…

If it looks like I’m phoning this one in, well, I am (and depending on how I like it tomorrow, may redo it)… I worked on a new doll for today, and I like her but she’s not ready yet.

Good news, bad news

Click for larger version; click for the doll.

Hey, this is Brian.

So: there’s good news and there’s bad news.

So: what? There’s always good news. And always bad news.

But here we go:

Liana and I met about a decade ago. That’s a long story. You know 2001? This movie about time. Long story. Cave dude throws that bone up into the air — it spins — sunlight — cut to spaceship. Yes, the movie says, some deliberate, ordered sequence of events happened between the bone going up into the air and this spaceship out way beyond the bleeding edge of the sky. But none of that is important, now, since we’re watching this spaceship. And that’s sort of how the movie starts. People mark time. Birthdays, durations of video screen calls, all this garbage. And by the end, there’s all this weird kick the can stuff that makes you want to lie down in the wet popcorn dust on the theater floor and feel time and space and so forth kind of loop out, and then the guy is old, and he’s walking through these rooms, and then there’s this spacebaby. And that’s sort of how the movie ends.

The point being that I could go on for a long time about Liana, how we met, what a joy it’s been to have her companionship and sweetness and laughter since. But instead I’ll jump cut to the fact that, well, she’s gone.

I never had her pegged for the ninjitsu type. True, the warning signs were all there. But she’s up and left us. She didn’t write a note. Ninjas don’t write notes. Nor do they leave forwarding addresses, or even, apparently, lock the doors on their way out.

To the ninja, every door is unlocked. Locks are illusions. Doors are illusions, too. So it makes sense, from a certain perspective.

Hers, not mine.

So now you know the bad news. To wit: ninjas don’t draw paper dolls either. Paper shurikens, maybe. But then they cut them out with the force of a thousand burning eagles and — well.

Thinking about it, I’m glad I’m still alive. I was married to a ninja!

But I feel bad for all of you, who apparently derived some satisfaction from Liana’s paperdoll art.

And I feel bad for myself. Because, come on, I don’t know where she is. Maybe she’s under the fridge. Hiding in the cabinet. Hidden in the shadow of a table leg. Waiting to strike, with the force of a thousand burning eagle paper shuriken.

Hence I’m making the best of things, and I’ll be drawing some paperdoll costumes for you. That’s the good news.

Today’s doll is a celebration of Springtime in the Rust Belt. Frog legs for springing through the mud, a stupid hat for the usual reasons, and a sandwich board bedecked with the smiling sun, token of the King of Shadows and the elves, and also the only thing anybody drinks in this state between approx. March and September.

Happy spring. Also, send me your ninja evasion tips. I’m already doing all the usual stuff: garlic, wolfsbane, mousetraps.

Quick note on the poll

The poll was messing up, so I changed the poll so people choose from a set, instead of writing in an answer. (If you want to write in, just choose the newest mermaid comment.)

Sorry about that to the two of you who already voted — revote, please, I included your answers!

(Brian, I’m not addressing you, just the other two people :P)

edit: forgot to change the link in the silver mermaid entry. Revote please!