One Last Dress from My Fair Lady and Two Dresses from Titanic from Liana’s Paper Doll Boutique

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My apologies, my time management skills have been lacking the last couple of days! So, here are a couple of Boutique dresses instead, and I will draw something new tomorrow. I’m glad I worked on the Boutique so diligently all that time ago, it’ll be a while before I run out of things to post. Anyways, these are the green dress from My Fair Lady and the beaded gown and boarding dress from Titanic.

The other poll is still going to be open for a few days, but I also want to move on to the next batch…

Two More Dresses from My Fair Lady from Liana’s Paper Doll Boutique

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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:

Two Fantasy Princess Gowns from Liana’s Paper Doll Boutique

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Sorry — let it get too late again! You can blame our new kitty, pictures of which can be seen on my Flickr stream. Anyways, here are two of the gowns from Liana’s Paperdoll Boutique.

Here’s the poll..

Two Halloween Costumes (Witch and Jester) from Liana’s Paperdoll Boutique

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Hey, ten days in a row of drawing without resorting to my old Boutique outfits, not bad right? Today we got a new kitten, so I’m kind of distracted. So, here’s a witch and a jester — one obviously a lot newer than the other, I still like the jester costume.

Here’s the poll..

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

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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:

Three Halloween Costumes (Clown, Dragon, Gypsy) from Liana’s Paperdoll Boutique

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As it happens, I’m entirely out of paper — I’m going to pick up a new sketchbook tomorrow or maybe later on today, but in the meantime the first of October passes without a single costume, which is very depressing. So, pardon me for falling back on my ten-year old boutique dresses once again! Here is a clown costume, a dragon costume and a gypsy costume for my ten-year old dolls. (Also, my devil costume and angel costume have links to the original Boutique versions as well.)

Look, an October poll!

Two Fantasy Princess Gowns from Liana’s Paperdoll Boutique

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Here are two of the fantasy gowns from my old Boutique site. The blue and white one seems to have a sort of military character to it, to me, like a Valkyrie ballgown, and I like the red on the other one…

I’ve been thinking about what constitutes a “Princess” gown, mostly because the three-pack of Kleenex my husband brought home when we were sick includes one box with the Disney Princess girls on it. (He was pretty sick too at this point, I doubt he thought anything but “wife needs kleenex, kleenex exists in these boxes, these boxes are available for purchase, go go go”) All of them have had some significant wardrobe additions since the Princess line came out: I’ve seen these gold dress variations a few times, and the Kleenex box has something similar to that, although the dresses are the original colors. Everything else is changed: every inch of fabric that can have gold scrolls or ropes of jewels or lace and embroidery now does, and there are other embellishments such as jeweled capes, lacy ruffs, tiaras and more detailed sleeves. Sleeping Beauty’s looks like she’s got a Venus flytrap on her shoulders, in my opinion, and I wish I could find a picture of this so everyone could agree with me. The box says that it’s the newest Disney Princess collection, “Jewels,” but I can’t find any pictures.

Anyways, I must admit that it delights my inner 10-year old, but it made me think of some of Amy Mebberson’s Disney drawings of the characters that didn’t make the core Princess group cut, such as Kida and Eilonwy — here’s one of the “Non Princess Club and here’s Disney’s Forgotten Princesses So I thought it would be fun to draw a dress for one of the girls left out of the Princess club in this poofy Bedazzled “Jewels” style… I’m not going to post a poll since there are so many options, but leave a comment and tell me who you think should have their dress redone!

Looking at the Non-Princess Club, I think it’d be fun to do a dress from the Sprite from Fantasia, but I’m open to suggestions on this one…

Three More 1800s Dresses from Liana’s Paperdoll Boutique

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I guess I’m not quite ready to return to that once-a-day ideal with this headache. That’s what you get for reading essays full-time! It’s too bad because now I’m all excited about paperdolling. But that’s OK, I’ll do one tomorrow… or Wednesday, perhaps, when I have a day off. But I’ll try for tomorrow!

These are the final outfits from the 1800 collection from my old site, Liana’s Paperdoll Boutique. I believe that the green caped confection is a reproduction of a bathing suit, although I don’t know what the reference was for that and can’t give any more precise details, as it was something like ten years ago after all.

Here, too, is this week’s poll… So in preparation for the plane rides I downloaded a bunch of short audiobooks off of Librivox, rather at random, and put them on my iPod, but I didn’t listen to all of them. Here are the candidates: what should I listen to next? (Keep in mind a paperdoll usually comes from whatever I’m listening to ;) )
The Big Bow Mystery, Carmilla, The Enchanted Castle, Otto of the Silver Hand, The Lone Star Ranger.

Three 1800s regency gowns from Liana’s Paperdoll Boutique

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Thank you everyone for the kind thoughts about our dear Maggie. It was a horrible time for all of us and all your thoughtful comments really made me feel better about her. The apartment seems so much different without her trotting around… Harume seems as placid as ever (we don’t call her Goldfish Brain for nothing) but she’s become more vocal, always meowing over and over. She doesn’t seem sad, though, but just chatty, so I guess she’s all right.

I’ve had a half-finished dress for a while now, so I decided to restart the process with some Boutique gowns… These are from the 1800s (though when I drew them I didn’t make any finer distinctions of time, so I forget exactly when they are supposed to be from). I put them up in honor of the kind link from Jane Austen Today, and also because I just finished Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and regency gowns are on my mind. I actually remember exactly where I was when I was drawing the gowns in this set: working in the computer lab at Tri-C back in high school, a job which entailed fixing jammed printers, cleaning up and signing people in and out. So I could sit at the desk by the door and have some downtime to draw, and I just thought I had it made!

My Fair Lady dresses from Liana’s Paperdoll Boutique

Click for larger version; click for the doll.

A weakness of mine, nine or ten years ago when I was drawing dresses like these for the Paperdoll Boutique, was always letting my desire for perfection (or completion, perhaps) take over, ultimately impeding what I actually wanted to do. It wasn’t enough to have one great outfit from a movie: they all had beauty and value and it was only worth doing if I did them all. Ideas and dresses I felt obligated to do crowded my mind and at a certain point it is easier to accept getting nothing done than it is to accept you can’t do everything you want to do. I do this all the time, and not just with paperdolls; I combat this tendency by drawing one thing a day, none if I’m just not feeling it (like tonight *yawn*) and not holding myself responsible for paperdolling every beautiful dress humans have ever created, or feeling guilty if I can’t draw everything waiting for its turn in my head.

But now I look back and I’m sometimes pretty impressed by the dedication I had to chronicling every single bit of something that I felt needed paperdolling. There are five in this group, here are two: and I guarantee you that at the time I felt bad that I didn’t get her dress from the ball.