So yesterday I did the vampire Carmilla’s bloody nightgown, and then I got to thinking how unfair it was that she got all the attention and long-suffering Laura got none. As a matter of fact, I can’t even remember Laura’s name without referring to Wikipedia or my previous entry. Face it, you really have to pile on the lace to make mild victims as interesting as seductive vampire women in bloody nightgowns. And so pile I did, and here is a dress from 1870 that Laura might have worn. To be honest, even though as near as I can tell 1870 is an accurate enough date for the book’s setting, I thought long and hard about going back a few years for inspiration. After all, Laura and her father lived in a castle in Germany in the middle of nowhere and who knows how well Laura kept up with English fashion in between vampire ravishings. But then I thought, she was still a growing girl and if her dresses were two or three years old, maybe she’d have outgrown them and wouldn’t be wearing anything that old? Maybe since her father is sort of vaguely rich, she orders a lot of new dresses? Maybe she spends a lot of time remaking her dresses referring to whatever fashion news she can get, because life in an isolated castle is so boring? So I over-thought this until I got fed up and tried to make an 1870s style day dress anyways, like I had initially planned. Since it’s not a copy of any one dress, it’s probably not historically accurate (I definitely have my misgivings about the way the overskirt turned out) but oh well, it was sure fun to draw.

New poll tomorrow, but this one will remain open for a few days yet…

For Annissa! :)

I’m still a little sick, so it’s not the best one I’ve ever done, but it’s a good start on the path to doing a paperdoll every day again… Anyways, this is a redrawing of one of the 1800s regency gowns I did for the Boutique. I must have based it off of something, but it was ten years ago, I have no idea what it was based on…

Now, this one requires some explanation. The Wikipedia page gives more information than most humans really want to know, but I’ll explain here, too… There’s a huge Japanese image board (like a message board, only based around images) called Futaba Channel, which has spawned a bunch of memes and original characters. XP-tan here is one of them, along with 2K-tan, OS X-tan, Linux-tan and so on… They’re all representations of operating systems. (Although it’s expanded since then…DS-tan is an example.) The “tan” is a corruption of “chan,” which is an affectionate, informal Japanese name suffix. XP-tan here is essentially pretty but useless…

I was thinking about XP-tan because I use Windows XP for my job, since it and Internet Explorer are required for the ETS test rater setup. Thanks to Brian setting up Bootcamp on my system, I can switch back and forth easily, and since I work at home, it helps with the feeling of being done with work for the day… to switch from annoying, ugly XP to my lovely Mac OS is like coming home. (I use the wrong keyboard commands for about an hour, though…) There are various Mac OS-tans, but I couldn’t find one with a design that was as well-recognized as the Windows-based ones, and I didn’t really like the green one that Wikipedia bases its image on…