When her partner suggested they sit, Linnetta agreed immediately, hoping that it wasn’t obvious that she was stumbling, rather than gliding, to the edge of the dance floor. He guided her to a chair beside another stranger, a woman dressed in shades of blue that seemed to shift and flow. Linnetta’s fatigue must have been getting to her; her head was swimming. Linnetta accepted a glass of punch, and — when she’d finished the whole thing in one decidedly un-aristocratic gulp — the woman in the blue gown had gone.

“I think I had better leave soon,” Linnetta said tentatively. “I’m exhausted… I think I’ve been overdoing it tonight.”

“But you can’t leave yet,” her dance partner answered, “the queen of the ball hasn’t been announced!” He leaned towards her and whispered conspiratorially, “You’re bound to win…”

This cheerful thought made her sit up a little straighter, eyeing her competitors. Certainly no other gown was as striking as hers, and no one else had a prayer of causing as much sensation as she had simply by showing up. Her partner scanned the crowd too, frowning.

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… Some dresses, like yesterday’s, take pages and pages of sketching and redrawing, and some dresses you sketch with a cheap pen while waiting for your car to be repaired and they come right together and couldn’t be any other way. Not complaining. I like this one, although the two middle blue shades are more different on the original than they are in the scan. (Today, after a good night’s sleep, I like the green one too…) The poll is still up, so please vote.

Linnetta, having refused several offers to dance, was catching up on society gossip. A young man–unfamiliar and handsome–approached. His exquisite demon costume, if cliche in concept, was marvelous in execution. Linnetta looked into his mesmerizing, dark eyes. He was grand, effortlessly aristocratic, putting everyone who had asked her for a dance to shame. She accepted his offer without even considering any of her stock phrases of polite refusal.

Unsurprisingly, he was a marvelous dancer; but Linnetta was quite out of practice, and her feet hurt, and she felt grateful when the first song ended. But the man’s grasp stayed tight around her waist, and when she looked at him with alarm, he only shook his head and said, “I
insist. After all, you have been isolated for so long…”

There was a rush of whispering behind them, and the pair turned to see a new arrival to the ball: a woman who wore a spangled gown too dark for the occasion, quite out of place with the bright colors of the masquerade. She did not speak, but prowled the edges of the dance
floor. Linnetta’s partner followed her gaze.

“I don’t believe I’ve met her,” he asked. “Have you?”

“I’m afraid not,” Linnetta answered. He made no further conversation, and she put the sparkling dress out of her mind and returned her concentration to her aching feet.

—————————

No one’s guessed the singer/group I learned to draw gold from yet… At this point the idea of not having to color that black and white gown seems like mercy, because, ow, my hand. Put up a new poll for next week – put in a couple new suggestions, dropped the bottom three from last week.

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.

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!

So while I promised you all four weeks of to-be-determined Halloween themes, this did leave three days at the beginning of the month, and those I promised to my husband. One of those he graciously returned for my use so I could make an October birthday dress in a timely fashion; the other two days I’m drawing as he wishes.

This first day is devoted to an outfit from the game Scribblenauts. It’s a DS puzzle game where you can solve challenges by writing almost any noun you can think of, then using it in some fashion. For example, in one level near the beginning, you have to knock over a stack of bottles without using “guns or cheating.” I created a bowling ball and tossed it at the bottles. Brian summoned a whale and dropped it directly over the stack. (We’ve been having these conversations that go like this: “How did you get past this stage? NO WAY. You can do that?” He also schooled me on proper summoning of Scribblenaut zombies…)

Anyways, this outfit belongs to the main character, Maxwell (although you can use different avatars in the game – I like running around as a bride). It’s pretty flat, but then the game is like that, so it works out well enough.

I’m sorry I didn’t post anything yesterday. I am almost all done with another paper doll, but her head is all wrong and I haven’t got it fixed to my satisfaction yet. I’ll try to put her up soon, though.

Tomorrow, we have Mega Man (OK, technically we have Sniper Joe, and probably with a cute little skirt at that). And then soon, in a surprise upset, Lord of the Rings beats fairies for week one of Halloween… For most of the time fairies had a comfortable lead. I would think some LOTR fansite linked to me, except for that I don’t see anything like that in my referrers… I guess the poll is not quite done yet, so it could still change, but I’m thinking starting next Sunday is hobbit o’clock.

I left it until too late, so I wanted to do something simple for today… This is just based off of a fashion plate of an 1893 bathing suit that I thought was extremely cute, even the silly little cap.

Still no one has guessed my favorite Prismacolor…

And also, the voting for the first week of Halloween costumes is still on, so don’t forget to vote! Feel free to suggest topics for the other weeks, too…

Finally, another birthday dress! I want to fill in the months I never got around to this year as well, but for now I will start at the current date. September’s birth flower (one of them, at least) is the forget-me-not, and its birth stone (again, one of them) is sapphire, making it easy to pick the dress’ predominant color. Adding the necklace on top of it all was kind of gilding the lily, but oh well.

It is only September 4th, but I’m starting to think about October. Last year I did a month of Halloween costumes, and I had so much fun I’m thinking of doing another theme month. I could do another month of random costumes like I did last year, or I could do something more narrowly focused. For example, Brian suggested a month of famous witch costumes – the Good Witch and the Wicked Witch, Willow, the Grand High Witch, Minerva McGonagall and so on. If anyone else has any other ideas, leave a comment! I’ve got all month to think about it.

Brian got Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride a little while back, and we traded off turns playing it for weeks. In terms of overall plot it’s pulled straight from the big book of RPG cliches – evil dude wants to take over! only the legendary hero can defeat him! queens are kidnapped! – but there’s two things that really make it great. One is “party talk,” where in different situations (entering a new town or dungeon level, for example, or after talking to most NPCs) you can talk to the characters that are in your group. The amount of dialogue this game must have is staggering – imagine writing a different response for all those different characters! It’s amusing because a lot of the time it’s stuff that you, the player, are probably thinking, so hearing it from another character in their own voice can be a little startling. It really helps make the characters real, too, when they have their own takes on situations or wonder about things that you might not even have noticed. That leads into the other thing that makes the game great: the generation system. You start out as a little kid, then time skips forward and you play as an adult, getting married, and then time skips forward again and your children are old enough to go adventuring with you. So it’s not like your character is accompanied by some random red mage, fighter and white mage: you’re almost always with friends, often with family, and they always have some interesting thing to say. For someone like me, who likes story and character interaction better than battle systems and so on, the game was great fun.

In the DS version of the game, you have the option to marry three women: Bianca, your childhood friend, Nera, the kind and gentle daughter of a rich family, and Deborah, Nera’s haughty and blunt sister. The game pushes you to choose Bianca (you have adventures with her in your childhoods, Nera has another guy that loves her, heck, in the old versions of the game if you didn’t choose Bianca her father died) but you can choose any of them. So I did choose Bianca my first time around, but Nera definitely has the prettier dress, and anyways she’s more my type, if I was a male RPG hero. (Although I suspect that playing the game with Deborah around to talk to is the most fun.)

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!