Meet Ivy, the first in my new paper doll series!

Click for larger version (PNG); click for PDF version.

Welcome Ivy to the paperdoll blog family! I’ll miss working with Sylvia and Iris, but they aren’t going anywhere, so you can always go back and look at them and their clothes. With the new scanner, I really needed a change, and I was getting enough requests for new dolls that I wanted to do something about it…

I have big plans for this model of paper doll. The base doll is actually bald and faceless – that means I can draw hair and faces separately and add them on with Photoshop, making it easier to have different options. I’m also drawing the doll itself differently this time. If you look at Iris, she was traced off of Sylvia, and that meant that it was easier to introduce mistakes – the paper shifted, it was difficult to see, and I drew some lines differently – so parts like the arms and legs are different. If I did a third doll from the same shape, she would be different from both Iris and Sylvia in some annoying way and it would be harder to fit even more dresses. This time, I have a very faint outline of the body, and the doll is colored right on top of that, meaning that there should be less variation between dolls. So the upshot: it should be easier to make different skin tones, hairstyles / colors and faces. I wonder if you can see where I hope to go with this someday? Well, there’s a lot of work to go between here and there…

The other big change is that I’m going to start offering PDF files of each drawing. For those of you who just like to look at the pretty pictures online, it won’t make much of a difference, but for those of you who actually print things out, using the PDF file instead of the PNG will guarantee that you’ll always have the right size, and the quality should be better as well. (It also means you can zoom in really close and look at all the flaws, but trust me: print it out and it’ll look smashing.)

I like her a lot, and I hope you all do too. I look forwards to making her many lovely outfits!

Site news!

Hello everyone who still reads this poor neglected blog! I’m alive, and I’m sorry I haven’t posted anything for so long. I will get back to posting more drawings soon, though.

The big news as far as this site is concerned is that I got a new scanner! Take a look at the old version of the purple empire waist prom dress, and compare it to this lovely new version of the purple empire waist prom dress. See any differences? The coloring, while not perfect, is much closer to the original, with more of the pinkish-lavender showing up, and the big thing: NO MORE BANDING! Hooray, hooray! It was the most depressing thing to make a beautiful dress and have all those ugly bands crossing it. I mean, look at this poor dress. And this sad dress got so mangled that I tried fixing it in Photoshop – you can’t even tell I did anything, can you? That’s why so many of my dresses towards the end were wedding dresses: light-colored things were the only ones that would come out right! The valley between how lovely they appear to me and how they show up to all of you was so vast, it just made me sad. But now there’s none of that.

My plan is to rescan the dresses I liked the best that were banded the worst. (Although I will keep the old scans up: surely someone out there is crying “I like the colors on the old prom dress better and I don’t care about the banding!” and there’s no reason not to please them too…) But I’ll also start scanning new things. Help me out with this one, paperdoll fans…

If you want to know what on earth in my life is so great and interesting that I don’t draw enough paperdolls, please feel free to check out my new blog, lianaleslie.wordpress.com. Honestly, it isn’t as enthralling as all that – it’s just a place for me to put ramblings that are quite out of place on a paperdoll blog.

Thank you for your patience, paperdoll fans, and thanks to everyone who left encouraging comments while I was AWOL!

Black and White Princess Gown for Coloring

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Posted without a lot of comment, as I’ve got to get out of the house, like, ten minutes ago — I’m pretty sure it was Fibro Witch who suggested something to color, so here’s a fussy, generic princess sort of gown with, hopefully, lots of scope for coloring imagination. If you color a version of it, send it to me and I’ll post it! I’ll color a version, too.

Recession Themed Robe à la Anglais in White and Green with Pouf à la Bailout

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So, my husband and I live in Michigan, more specifically in Ann Arbor, one of the cities surrounding Detroit. On the good side, it’s almost spring and there’s nothing like the University of Michigan campus when everything is blooming and the students come out of hiding to play Frisbee by the Diag. On the bad side, the unemployment rate is 11% and our poor state is national shorthand for a grim future. Now, if I was a more diligent, self-promoting kind of artist, instead of the flighty, self-doubting, unambitious dabbler that I am, I would be taking advantage of the sad state of American finances, pitching books, putting out press releases, writing up guest posts for other blogs and who knows what else. Why’s this? Because paper dolls are the perfect toy for the modern recession.

Think of it: Iris and Sylvia can wear anything I draw, so it’s not like a regular old book with a limited number of outfits, and you can print this crazy gown for just as much money as it takes to print this subtle shift. Barbie can’t seamlessly transform into a mermaid or a ninja near as well as my girls do, and I doubt her people would let her dress up in anything too creepy. And you know what else? No Barbie doll, no other paper doll out there, no one in the world period, has a terrifying cross between one of Marie Antoinette’s court gowns and the symbols of American financial catastrophe. Yes, this may be a slightly strange toy, but that’s OK: for those that don’t yet see the tumbling Dow in the skirt, print out this pretty princess instead. We who see the humor of the pink slip petticoat and pouf à la bailout will play princesses of a more desperate time and space. Pass the cake.

Yes, I’m reading Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore To The Revolution and loving it. (thanks RLC for the recommendation!) See, I’ve always thought of 1800s fashions as beautiful and elegant (and OK, maybe at worst endearingly funny-looking) but I never could get into 1700s fashions, with the goofy hair and panniers and all. But this bias is probably because so many classic books I’ve read are set in the 1800s: the Austen books, of course, but also Vanity Fair, Little Women, Sherlock Holmes, the Anne series, Gone With The Wind, Edith Wharton novels, Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina — anyways, I can go on and on, but the point is that reading / watching movies based on / paperdolling these books gave me a vague idea of the 1800s in European / American women’s costume. However, I don’t have a similar basis for the 18th century. The only ones I can think of offhand are the Three Musketeers, A Tale of Two Cities and the Scarlet Pimpernel series, and Evelina which I just finished. Somehow, looking at all the robes a la polonaise for Evelina flipped a switch somewhere, and now I’m intrigued by that same goofy hair and panniers. I’d like to get more into fiction from the 1700s or set in the 1700s. Can anyone recommend anything for me? I’d love to have some 18th century audiobooks from Librivox, but I’ll also go the old fashioned way.

The hairpiece will sort of fit both dolls, but there’s one part of Iris’ hair that you would have to bend back. My next series of dolls will be bald.

Ginger Rogers’ White Dress from Never Gonna Dance from Swing Time, take two

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So I drew a white dress Ginger Rogers wears at the end of Swing Time some time ago, and I never liked how it came out — I drew it a couple of days after watching the movie without much reference, it wasn’t well done to start with and my scanner washed it out. So it’s one of the dresses I always told myself I’d redraw, and then it got to be the number one image on a Google image search for “ginger rogers swing time” and in the second row for “swing time” and people started e-mailing me about how to reproduce it. How embarrassing! The skirt on the old dress didn’t look like it could hardly move, and it was so pale it was like not even a dress at all. Some nights, if the dress takes more than an hour it just isn’t happening, and this must have been one of those nights… Finally, I redrew it tonight, using this video of Never Gonna Dance. You can still see the old drawing, and I’ve got a link to it at the other blog post too, but I like this one much better. Thanks to a reader recommendation I’ve got another Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire movie waiting for me to watch it, Follow the Fleet, so I’m looking forwards to that!

Magic Wiki Dress #1: Purple Gown with Black Tulle Skirt and White Shift

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Wikipedia was never as fun as my Magic Wiki Dress, at least for me anyways. I loved watching things shift from dinosaurs to masquerades back to dinosaurs, and so on. Brian was at Recent Changes Camp 09, a conference at wikis, this last week (which is what inspired the post in the first place) and he reported that Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki, said at the “Creation Myths of Wiki” session that for a wiki to really work, “you have to believe that not done is better than done.” A perfectionist like me doesn’t always get that, but I feel like I did while watching the wiki get edited. I could let it go all year and see what people come up with — and I definitely want to draw some of the other outfits it produced. But to make things simple, I gave it a deadline this time, and this was the last outfit that got posted before noon on the 21st. I don’t like how the sheer purple part turned out, I forgot all about the gloves, the silver scrollwork turned into black scrollwork somewhere along the line and I took some artistic license on the shift, but I think it turned out pretty nicely! It was definitely interesting to draw…

Magic Wiki Dress: The Aftermath

Thanks to everyone who added something to the Magic Wiki Dress! I had so much fun watching the dress evolve. Here’s the final version:

A purple bodice with a sweetheart neckline and basque waistline, embroidered
with light purple flowers over a floor length white shift whose neckline, with
a little lace, peeks out from under the bodice.
Over the shift, is a tulle skirt with the hem embroidered with
silver fancy scrollwork. Over that skirt is a
is a sheer purple skirt with train. It matches
the coloration of the purple bodice.

She also has a subtle webbed crystal frill tiara (with detachable
silk veil) with flower patterns and dripping tiny purple seed
pearls. Around her neck is a matching flower pendant made from
crystals. and she has subtle matching dangle earrings

However, I liked a lot of the other dresses that showed up, so I will probably draw a few of them as well next week. After all, I can’t resist tiny helpful pterodactyls, and I feel it is necessary that I prove to someone that blended harvest colors look lovely. So, thanks for doing the work for me for coming up with so many great ideas!

Click here to look at the revision history and get a sneak preview of what I’ll be drawing next week.

Magic Wiki Dress

So my husband had this great idea: he suggested I draw a Wiki Dress. That is, have a wiki (a page that anyone can edit) with a dress description, let everyone edit it for a few days and draw the results. So please edit the wiki however you see fit: I’m going to leave this up until noon (eastern standard time) on the 21st and at that point I’ll draw what got described in the wiki.
Edited on the 20th: I love how the Wiki Dress is going. I don’t think I’ll be able to just draw the final version, as I had planned — I’ll draw a couple of suggested dresses instead. That means there will be dinosaurs, yes.
Edited on the 21st: The Magic Wiki Dress is done for now — thanks to everyone who had something to add!

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.