Halloween LOTR Costume Series #2: Black and White Elf Gown with Circlet and Embroidered Edging

Click for larger version (black and white elf dress) (PNG), click for larger version (blue and gold ball gown) (PNG); click for PDF version (black and white elf dress), click for PDF version (blue and gold ball gown).Click here for the list of dolls.

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!

Morning Glory Blue and White Princess Gown

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So the masses – relatively speaking, at least, eighty-some paperdoll fans at last count – have spoken, and you want me to draw new things instead of spending my time rescanning old ones. I maintain that if you knew how beautiful some of my old dresses were supposed to be — but new things it is, and I will rescan old things on days when I am feeling lazy.

This is technically a lazy day too: when I was on vacation I got together with my cousin Becky and we got out the Prismacolors for an old-school paperdoll jam session! This gown and another I’ll post tomorrow are the ones I did, and she did two as well which I will post. The gold looks a little flat on this one because I used the Prismacolor gold pencil which doesn’t scan well, but I really like how the blue came out. It looks like it could be a backup for one of my twelve neglected princesses, doesn’t it?

1778 Light Blue Robe a la Polonaise with Rose and Flower Trim Inspired by Fanny Burney’s Evelina

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So I recently finished listening to the Librivox recording of Evelina by Fanny Burney, which is not a book I knew of before browsing the Librivox catalog but I’m quite glad I put in the sixteen hours necessary to listen to it. I don’t recall Evelina being referenced in any of the Jane Austen novels, but I believe a couple of Fanny Burney’s other novels are mentioned in Northanger Abbey. Certainly Austen would have read Evelina, and her characters might have secretly wished for a Lord Orville like everyone seems to wish for a Mr. Darcy these days. It’s about a timid and innocent girl, who is overly both, I think, for modern sensibilities, but still a sympathetic main character. Her situation was so precarious (she has a “mysterious” background and no powerful friends looking out for her interests) and she always seemed to be getting into so many misunderstandings that I had to look the ending up on Wikipedia to make myself less nervous about the possibility of her being deceived by a rake or exposed to ridicule in a way that would destroy her reputation forever. (Having recently come off of The Age of Innocence, and having abandoned Ruth after skimming its Wikipedia page and finding out that things didn’t end well, I couldn’t sink hours into listening to another depressing novel.) I think, though, that it’s a very fun novel even if I fretted over the heroine and her perils. Sir Clement Willoughby is a tremendous bounder and it’s quite satisfying to despise him, and Evelina’s family and acquaintances are all colorful even if they’re mortifying to her. It might remind a modern reader of Austen, but the feeling that something is always about to go wrong makes it more salacious. Elizabeth Bennett was never caught by Mr. Darcy in the company of disreputable women, that’s for sure.

The book was published in 1778, and there aren’t any time references inside the book that meant anything to me, so I’m just going to go with what its readers might have worn although the book perhaps was set a couple years earlier. Corbis has, for some reason, a great number of fashion plates from 1778 (just search “1778 dress”) and I was struck by how different many of them appeared from what I think of from the late 1700s, the robe á la française and the robe à l’anglaise. The style that struck me is apparently the robe à la Polonaise, and even if perhaps Evelina is supposed to be set a couple years earlier than 1778, I will comfort myself with the thought of her wearing many of these dresses after the novel ends. Don’t ask me about the hat. It didn’t quite work out, but the first draft ended up with antennae and a windmill so this is sort of an improvement.

Incidentally, I was a little surprised to find Evelina mentioned in a recent article about the movie Confessions of a Shopaholic, as it boasts “literature’s first shopping spree”. Yeah, I’m probably not going to see that movie, even if it has clothes like this unholy concoction of neon ribbon and dalmatian fur that beg for paperdolling. I was reading an article a while back (couldn’t find it, sadly) talking about how in this economic climate, over-the-top chick flicks like Shopaholic might be edited so that the protagonists learn a couple convenient lessons before the end, which made me think, yeah, I’d probably fork over $8 to watch a movie like “Confessions of a Shopaholic” if the main character ended up like Lily Bart.

By the way, mark your calendars for the 22nd, a week from now: I’m going to be liveblogging (livedrawing?) the Oscars. I don’t know precisely how that will work, but it’s going to be fun.

Black and Blue Heavens Masquerade Gown with Jupiter-Inspired Underskirt and Gold Curls

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So, I hope you all out there are having good luck with your New Years resolutions, because I, oh, TOTALLY failed mine already. (”Draw more,” of course.) Yeah, sad, I know. I have no excuse, and I offer a fancy dress in penance.

I designed this one when drawing Diana’s masquerade gown, but I thought it would be a poor spy who would wear something so dramatic, so I drew the blue gown instead. But I did like the design, and so it didn’t get tossed with the rest of my sketches.

Blue Watery Masquerade Ball Gown with Satin Blue Underskirt and Crystals

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So recently, I got an e-mail from Diana asking if I could draw a dress for a roleplay she was taking part in. I went through and read the scenario, and Diana’s character Leslie is a human spy in a magical world who has to infiltrate a masquerade ball attended by aristocrats. So I thought this was a fun challenge: what sort of thing might a spy wear to such a ball? It’s dead easy to make a gown that says “hey everyone, look at me!” or one that says “I am a Woman of Mystery” but one that looks expensive and magical enough that no one questions its wearer’s right to be there, yet isn’t so noticeable that everyone winds up talking about her… fun. I ended up going with blue, a rich but soothing color, and an overskirt with fabric like shimmering water and seafoam, studded with crystals — although I don’t really think the crystals worked out too well. Oh well. Diana, I hope you like it anyways, and I look forward to seeing where the story goes!

The poll is yet ongoing…

Mermaid Monday #9: Arctic Mermaid with Deep Blue Tail and White and Blue Top Trimmed with Pearls and Sapphires

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I was going to do an unfortunate light-green colored mermaid this week, but it is the first of the month. You may remember from last week’s installment that mermaids associate light green with death, and even if it is a superstition I created with no basis in mythology or reality, it still seems inauspicious to start one’s month with an ill omen. Instead, since it’s getting snowy here, I thought I’d do a wintery-looking mermaid.

Now, mermaids tolerate cold temperatures very well; their clothes are almost entirely ornamental and they can swim around entirely naked if they choose, although for obvious reasons I end up focusing on the ones who opt for shirts and shells. So even the mermaids who live further to the north in colder waters, like this one, don’t have to do much covering up. Don’t be fooled by her sleeves, they provide about as much warmth as the average silk scarf and their only purpose is to swish fetchingly around her wrists as she chats animatedly with her friends.

Colorblock Mini Dress (inspired by the Metafilter colors) with White Go-Go Boots

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Hello Mefites! Wow, this very well may cure me of just abandoning my site for a few weeks…

Anyways, for those of you who aren’t Metafilter readers, it’s a community blog for the “best of the web,” and someone posted a very thorough writeup of my paperdoll blog. Metafilter being no trifling little site, my traffic has gone something like this: plodplodplodplodWHEEEEEEEEE. I’ll post a picture later.

For those of you just arriving, I thought I’d point out some of my favorites that the writeup didn’t mention:
I did twenty outfits for my Halloween Costume Series, some of which are my favorite things that I’ve ever drawn. (My mom really likes the first one, the Good Queen’s Ghost, but she wants to give it a good washing.)

One of my mermaids was linked to from the Metafilter post, but there are many more. My favorite, of course, is the wedding mermaid, although she throws people searching for mermaid-style wedding dresses for a loop.

For some reason, my drawings of Princess Garnet’s white gown and Princess Ashe’s Wedding Dress (from FFIX and FFXII, respectively) both turn up very high in a Google image search for either of the two characters; Ashe’s wedding dress is my site’s single most popular image. I’m glad, then, that they turned out reasonably well, unlike Cloud’s dress, which I will probably redo before the end of the year.

I have been known to do nice things for people who link to me. Hint, hint.

This is just the tip of the paperdoll iceberg; I have a whole other series of paperdolls from earlier in my life. (The Boutique paperdolls that I’ve been putting up are even older than that, too…)

Thank you for visiting, and I hope you enjoy the site!