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!

Being my own harshest critic I have a lot of things about myself that I want to improve, but my main resolution for 2009 is to improve my drawing skills. I like a lot of what I did in 2008, but I’m still skating on techniques and habits I was using in high school. With a lot of work and some luck, maybe by 2010 I can draw hands… Anyways, my favorite outfit from 2008 was the bride mermaid, while the one that got the most hits was Princess Ashe’s wedding dress.

2008 brought many great things for me and Brian, and I have a lot of hope going into 2009. I wish you all the best for the new year, and I hope to draw a lot of beautiful things to amuse you!

I’m curious about this, so take the poll. Me, of course I don’t cut out the originals. Instead I keep them in a big cardboard box that my cats like to sit on. My mom would be horrified, and I need to think up some better storage system…

So, today I don’t think I’ll have the time to get to the doll I was hoping to do, the coloring of which was going to be based on a particularly pretty image I saw on this webcam the other day. The reason I won’t have time, and the reason I was looking at that webcam, is that I’m going on vacation! Yay! Yay! We need a vacation like crazy, I’ve been working full-time lately and I’m quite sick of Brian pulling 13+ hour days. We’re going up to see my family and to spend time in a lovely area with no internet access whatsoever.

I had a plan for the time I was going to be done, but I ended up being just too busy with work, I’m afraid. So I’m going to post some Boutique things automatically while I’m gone. I forget, while they’re old and clunky-looking to me, they’re new to a lot of you, so I hope you don’t mind them too much.

Oh yeah, it’s also my birthday — I like to make a fuss over my birthday most of the time, but right now all I care about is getting up in that airplane. I will feel older once I’m on vacation, I’m sure!

I’m putting up a poll while I’m going to be gone, since I’m curious… Feel free to add comments.

So I started a belly dance class (beledi, to be precise) a few weeks back. Unsurprisingly, it’s always been something that appealed to me (fancy veils! shiny coins! etc.) but I’m ridiculously uncoordinated, disconnected from my body, overweight, quite self-conscious, can’t tell my right from my left, and in every way am the type of person who should stay well away from dance classes. But once I got over the abject terror involved in stepping into the studio and completing the first class, I was hooked. Hip shimmies are a lot of fun if you’ve got plenty of hip to put into them, for one thing, and the movements are something I can usually do once I watch closely and practice for a bit. Of course I’ll never be a “dancer” in any way; people say “just let go” and “just follow the music” and “don’t think about it” and apparently I walk around in a near constant state of tenseness because all that is impossible for me. In class I feel like I’m translating everything the teacher does into a flowchart for me to follow and when I do something with my body that I can’t explain with words, like pivoting or this one veil move, it’s really quite unsettling for me.

Anyways, as far as I know (and keep in mind I’m a total noob) there are two styles of costumes, cabaret and tribal, cabaret being the highly beaded bra and skirt look and tribal going for a more ethnic, fantasy look. I really like the tribal look, so that’s what I went with for this paper doll. She’s got a green choli, a red hipscarf and a black full skirt, all trimmed with gold and gold coins. I covet the choli I drew for my doll, but I’m not so sure I’d have the courage to wear it!

At the moment, the vampire has pulled ahead… there’s still time for the Good Queen to come back ahead though.

So my husband’s business is called Different Chairs, and he does a lot of different things, but chief among them is web development using Django. He has been helping put together a new weather site, JustWeather.com, which just officially launched the other day. What’s so great about another weather site, you ask? Well, it shows real-time, helpful weather information, it has great animated maps that you can enlarge and it doesn’t have a lot of other information cluttering up the screen — just weather, right? Frankly, it has more weather information than most decent humans want to know, and my dear husband has been living and breathing weather for months now. (There’s a reason our new cat is named Radar. She narrowly escaped being called “Haircast.”)

So, in honor of Brian and the weather site, Sylvia and Iris can now brave weather in a cute short khaki trench coat, although you wouldn’t want to brave too much weather in a skirt like that, I guess!

The Good Queen’s undead nemesis seems to be catching up…

So today I hardly know what to do with myself without a month-long theme. I did make a couple of fixes to the Halloween costumes — the gypsy now has a little bandanna, and the scarecrow has a hat. Plus, the pirate costume legs didn’t work all that well, so I edited that, and also edited the mermaid a bit to fit better. (The nurse also needs editing, so don’t print her out just yet.) Since I didn’t draw anything new, here are some Boutique dresses from My Fair Lady.

Janel tagged me for a meme a while back, and since it is only six things about myself, my apologies for putting it off so long!

1) I speak Japanese at a lower-intermediate level; higher when I’ve been studying, lower when I haven’t been. I feel like I haven’t forgotten most of what I’ve learned, but I need to study to draw it out, so when I haven’t been studying (like recently) it’s not really a skill I can count on. My favorite part is studying kanji, and my very, very long-term goal is to be able to read the Tale of Genji.

2) I can’t really draw anything besides paper doll clothes. Just look at Sylvia and Iris’ feet! (Or, you know, please don’t look at their feet.) Before our cat Maggie died, I was practicing drawing human figures more, but afterwards I lost the desire to draw for a while and then I never got back into it. Now, I’d like to get a second sketchbook and practice drawing hands, feet, all the things I can’t stand.

3) My husband and I have been together for a decade, married for five years; we met online through a website that I had when I was sixteen and he was seventeen. We have the sort of life where, if you filmed part of it for a movie, it would have to be some sort of horror or suspense movie where bad things happen to us, because the first few scenes of our lives are so wonderful you just know bad luck is bound to come into our lives. So far nothing really bad has happened yet, and I’ve quit worrying that the Sword of Damocles is an inch away.

4) I’m a morning person (while my husband would happily wake up at noon and sleep at three or four) and I do my best work in the morning — but I start work at 8:30, so usually I draw after getting off work. And man, if I don’t have a decent idea and the beginnings of a sketch at 8, 9 PM, that’s the time when I post a Boutique dress or two and call it a day…

5) I have been a horrible hermit this year; I have a couple of good friends who moved away, and my parents moved to Washington State, plus I work at home! I’m an introvert, so it doesn’t really bother me, but I think next year I’ll try to be more social…

6) I can’t tell my right from my left easily, I have to make an L with my left hand to know which is which. My mom used to think this was something I should learn not to do, and she bothered me about it when I was driving with her in the car. I still do it, and when we’re together she drives. Someday I may have to drive her around, and then I think I will have to blindfold her.

I’m running out of time for tonight, so I’ll decide who to tag later…

I extended this poll a few days:

So… yeah… has it really been four days? I’m so sorry, time flies when you’re glued to your computer playing Mother 3, which I think is possibly the best videogame I’ve ever played, ever. I can’t stop thinking about it and may start another play-through, but don’t worry, next time I’d balance it out with things like drawing paperdolls and doing dishes.

Anyways, back to Halloween! Sharon posted a comment about how her granddaughter’s name is Liana too and she loves ladybugs, so she wanted to see a ladybug costume — I hope this one doesn’t disappoint. Always happy to do something for a fellow Liana. When I was a kid I wanted to do something great and famous so that people would be inspired to name their daughters Liana and I could get pencils and stuff with my name printed on them. Since I never figured out what that great and famous thing would be, and “a pencil with my name on it” became less of a life goal in and of itself, I wound up drawing paperdolls, but nonetheless I urge people to consider the name Liana for their future children. It sounds pretty, it goes well with a variety of last names, it’s a type of tropical vine, a type of programming language and a kind of car, and — to me at least — it looks more simple and pure than Leanna, Lianna, Leeanne, and such variants. (Begone, double N!)

My husband and I split a CSA share with another family we know, and ours is with the Community Farm of Ann Arbor. (CSA stands for community supported agriculture; basically you pay for a share up front then over the course of the season you get a part of whatever vegetables are grown. For example, our share this week included sweet potatoes, swiss chard, broccoli and twenty bell peppers.) This week, they announced a “goods and services day,” where people could come to show and sell the things they make. I had to go anyways to pick up the share, so I thought, well, why not?, printed off a bunch of paper dolls and brought my drawing materials to the farm. I was the only one who showed up with anything, but it was great to be in the barn working on my dresses, and Annie (one of the owners of the Community Farm) loved them, helping to make up for my complete lack of salesmanship. I think the question I got the most is how I make a living off of them — the answer, of course, is that I don’t, it’s just a hobby. (The text ads do make enough money to cover hosting and replacement colorless blender pencils, which is very nice.) Second most common question was “why paperdolls?” for which the most true answer is, I’m pretty bad at drawing just about anything besides clothes, and I love drawing clothes enough that this doesn’t bother me.

If you like today’s scarecrow costume at all you can thank Annie for saving it; I got about a fourth of the way through sketching it out and was looking at it rather dubiously, but she thought it was so cute, so I kept going with it, and I think it turned out all right. Being on the farm made me think of things like scarecrows, and certainly I had enough reference material for the straw… You can thank Brian, too, for the bird. That’s the first thing he said when I showed it to him, that it needed a bird. Such insights are why I keep him around!

Taken my poll yet?

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.

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.