Two More Prom Dresses from Liana’s Paper Doll Boutique

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Sorry for two days of Boutique posts in a row, I’m just feeling horribly uninspired today. Anyways, the yellow gown is probably my favorite of the sixteen prom dresses I did for the Boutique! I’ll do something new tomorrow though.

Mermaid Monday #11: White Mermaid Ball Gown with Embroidered Choli Top and Aquamarine Overskirt

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

Mermaids are not universally welcome at human balls. In most kingdoms near the sea their presence is unremarkable, but the further inland one goes the less mermaids visit, and the appearance of one at a ball can be a serious disruption. It’s not surprising that they cause annoyance and envy among the human women and prompt duels and inconvenient attachments among the human men, but besides that they are difficult to feed, not always aware of proper deportment and their air of superiority and condescension is often a little hard to take for humans of either sex. One insecure queen went so far as to ban them from all events given during her reign. (Mermaids mostly stay out of human politics, but stung by this, the equally insecure empress of the nearest mermaid empire ensured that said reign would be a short one by secretly inciting treason and eventually civil war in that kingdom. The loss of life and damage to the kingdom was incalculable, but the mermaids got their dances back.)

A mermaid choosing a gown for a ball thrown by humans generally wants to outdo every other woman there, human and mermaid alike, because the most common fault among them is vanity, followed closely by pride. Some of them do it by going with human fashions, thereby beating the human women at their own game, and some prefer to go with gowns designed for mermaids, which tend to evoke the sea, be less formal and hide the legs. (Most mermaids are self-conscious about having legs, as the vast majority of cheap mystics really don’t have the skill or knowledge of anatomy to form perfect ones for very long, so mermaid skirts are inevitably long and loose. The mermaid wearing a miniskirt is the one who gave up her firstborn.) This dress is definitely a mermaid gown; the human women at the ball where this will be worn will all be wearing more elaborate gowns, closer to what I think of as stereotypical princess gowns: tight bodices, poofy skirts. (Although some human women near the sea, where mermaids are more likely to show up to balls, have taken to wearing things mermaids can’t: shorter dresses, gowns slit up the side, tight skirts.) The choli-style top, the lotus and wave pattern, the fluttery aquamarine overskirt all make this gown arresting and otherworldly: just the thing for toying with the hearts of humans, leaving them crushed like a shellfish dropped onto a rock by a seagull. Later the human women will gossip about how revealing and tacky the top was, how unfashionable the whole savage getup was compared to their gowns, but the target of their ire will be already safely back under the sea with new stories to tell.

Michelle Obama’s Turquoise Blue Dress from the 2008 Democratic Convention

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

I’m sorry I’ve been such a slacker for the last few months! My essential nature, or the problem with my essential nature if you will, is that I can do just about anything for two weeks, and then it’s on to my next all-consuming interest. I do my best work in the depths of an obsession. So, I’ve worn out about two months worth of other projects, and now I’m back to paper dolls. I have a project for October, so I want to start again now… a warm-up, if you will.

Since the U.S. presidential race is much on my mind as of late, I thought outfits from the current political scene would be a fun way of burning up the days between now and October 1. I’ll do one from Michelle Obama’s wardrobe, one of Cindy McCain’s dresses, a Sarah Palin outfit and of course a Hillary Clinton pantsuit. Please note that this is not an invitation to debate politics or insult any of these women on the comments here! (Well, paperdoll fans are a civilized lot, and I probably lost all of my readers in my two-month vacation anyways, so I should be safe.)

I personally like Michelle Obama’s dress here that she wore when she spoke at the 2008 Democratic Convention. Can’t find any good pictures of the little center ornament, though — and the color of the dress changes from picture to picture, it seems!

Blue and gold princess gown (based on a gown from Liana’s Paperdoll Boutique)

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

I can almost hear my mom now. “She said her midterm was on Thursday, why isn’t anything up yet?”Poor Mom. ;) This is just an update of one of my old Boutique fantasy gowns. This was one of my favorites; there was something about the blue that I liked. I still remember which blues I used originally (ultramarine and Copenhagen blue)… but arguably I was better at doing gold back then.

Check it out, University of Texas has a paper doll collection. They have a few dolls and outfits online, too, representations of women who donated to the accompanying textile collection; I totally dig December’s Christmas tree dress.

Blue and Sea Green Mermaid Tail with White and Gold Top

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

If you like this mermaid, click the “Mermaid Monday!” tag for more — I draw a mermaid, or a mermaid-related outfit, every Monday.

Me and my mermaids! I don’t know when I started drawing paperdolls, but I can assure you there was a mermaid tail or two among those first batches, unscanned and lost. In the doll-drawing process the question “Is she mermaidable?” is a lot more important than “Are her hands right?” (Because the odds are good her hands aren’t right, and I may as well worry about what’s fixable.)

The mermaid tail process has actually been about the same since I started. Consider Exhibit A, one of about a dozen mermaids drawn for the long-gone Paper Doll Boutique, and Exhibit B, Anna’s foray into mermaidhood. I thought I had lost it, but, unlike many things that could be classified as useful life skills, coloring mermaid tails is something I’ve retained, and the basic technique has always been the same. (The main difference between exhibit A and B and the current one is the method used for blending. At the time of the Boutique, I was blending with white and not the colorless blender, which gives them an odd pearly look… Plus the scanner was not as nice as my current one.) I should do a tutorial sometime, it’s really quite easy.