So the first thing to understand is that I have eighteen grey pencils in three sets of six, French Grey, Warm Grey and Cool Grey. For each set, the 10% pencil is the lightest and the 90% pencil is the darkest, with 20%, 30%, 50% and 70% in between. I almost always use French Grey — I think it has a nice warm tone to it, it blends well with the colorless blender and the lightest French Grey is lighter than the lightest greys from the other two sets. Most of the white dresses or parts of dresses that you see on my site will have been done in French Grey. I like Cool Grey for silver, white parts with cooler colors like blue and sometimes just if I’m bored of French Grey. Warm Grey I don’t use all that much.

Generally with grey I work from lights to darks. I like to start off with light lines and pin them down with darker colors later, so I used French Grey 20% and Cool Grey 20% to draw the base of the swimsuit and cover-up (traced over the doll). 10% is hard to see, so I’ll usually go with 20% or 30% here.

Using French Grey and Cool Grey 10%, I colored most of the area where I intend to have shaded areas eventually. This is the base that the rest of the grey goes on, so these lines are more like a covering than sharply defined shadows.

Working my way up now, I’m using French Grey and Cool Grey 20% to lightly redefine where the shadows are going to go.

French and Cool Grey 30% define the darker areas even more now and start to make it look less flat.

Now that I’ve used the lighter colors (10%, 20%, 30%) I like to stop and blend a bit with the colorless blender. The general way I use the colorless blender is to rub it over the dark areas first, blending them into the lighter areas gradually and softening the whole area. I don’t always use the colorless blender with white outfits, though — it makes it smoother but it only makes a really dramatic difference with colors. I especially won’t use it with whites if I’m scared of accidentally dragging another color into the white section.

Going from 30% to 50% with the French and Cool greys is a big jump – if I wasn’t doing the tutorial, I might stop here and not use the darker greys, because the more you use the darker greys, the more risk there is of it looking less “white” and more “grey.” Anyways, I redid all the major lines and some of the shading with French and Cool Grey 50% here.

Using French and Cool Grey 70%, I added in even deeper shadows, especially around the knot at the waist, and redid the border lines.

Going back to French and Cool Grey 50%, I added in deeper shading where I thought it was needed. (Note, in this tutorial I don’t use the 90% colors at all. Beware if you have them out with the others, more than once I’ve picked up 90% when I meant to use 70% and made myself very grumpy.)

Again, I’ve smoothed out the colors with the colorless blender. I also added some more shadowing to the sides with the 50% pencils.

Added color to the flower and some little pink dots to the cover-up, and voila! I would have probably stopped at step 7 if I was doing a proper outfit, though. I think you can use a lot of grey and still have something be read as white, but it’s easy to slip into being more grey than white. In this white dress which I think turned out well, the lines are all French Grey 50% and the only hint of 70% is at the folds in the hem.

On the good side, I got a new pencil sharpener; its box promises an “extra heavy duty motor” and indicates that it is designed for “continuous” use. Which is good, because I subject my poor sharpeners to some sad conditions… Anyways, today I got started too late and wasn’t feeling inspired at all, so here are two fairy dresses from the old Boutique.

The poll continues:

So for some reason one of my most popular keywords these days is “printable paper dolls deadly night shade.” Hello out there, whoever it is who wants a nightshade paper doll! I hope you enjoy this one.

This fairy is a lackey for the Fairy of Malice, who you can see if you check out my old paper doll page and scroll a bit. And, I think, she also should make those of you who voted for skimpy costumes happy, and those of you who actually cut these paperdolls out sad, because I can’t imagine this being very easy to cut out!

Continue blasting back the zombies through the magic of paperdolls:

Brian and I went the other day to see the 2007 Oscar nominated animated short films at the Michigan Theater. This outfit here is Madame Tutli-Putli, from the short named after her, alternately titled by Brian “the Silent Hill short” for its surreal, creepy atmosphere. The way the short was produced was stunning (and eerie, with those human eyes tracked on the puppets) but the content seemed to be trying too hard to be deep. Yes, she’s timid, yes she’s got all that “baggage,” yes, it’s depicting an acceptance of death, but the aliens removing livers was a little beyond me. (And no, I don’t think it was a literal account of an organ-harvesting ring, as I’ve read elsewhere…)

My favorite one was My Love, followed by Even Pigeons Go To Heaven.