“Whoever that one is, she’s gone too far,” he said quietly, and she forced her eyes open and found the cause of the commotion: at the top of the stairs, a newcomer in a black and orange gown. “This must be unbearable for you,” he continued. “Or do you know her?”

“I don’t,” she said uneasily. “It’s someone’s idea of a joke…”

“Perhaps,” he replied. “Or perhaps not.”

As they were talking, the strange women Linnetta had been trying not to notice all night had gathered at the base of the stairs; the other revelers had given the five of them a wide berth, and they stood motionless, staring out at the dance floor.

“I think you do know who she is,” her partner continued. “I think you’ve known each of them since you saw the third one; possibly the second.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. Wisps of hair fell out of her updo, sticking to her face. “It must be some kind of joke. A trick, to try to scare everybody.”

“I’m afraid not.”

“But how? How is it even possible that they’re…?”

“They have made their own pacts,” he answered lightly. “There are other powers than those you have dealt with, you know.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“Liar,” he replied, with an indulgent smile. “I know all about the bargain you made… Almost all, anyways. Was it that you were already sick, and you traded their lives for your own? Or was your illness part of the ruse, so you could avoid suspicion?”

“I — I could never do such a thing,” Linnetta whispered, but it was unconvincing even to her.

“And so you were able to possess them, and manufacture their deaths one by one. But Georgiana has been seeking her revenge ever since the night you directed her off that cliff. Did you think she could let such a thing rest, even in death?”

Linnetta turned reflexively towards the woman in the black spangled dress, and her eyes were so captivating that she didn’t even realize the queen of the ball was being announced. Her partner had to give her a little push towards the center of the dance floor; a crown was placed on her head and everyone started applauding. She smiled graciously and waved, but faltered when she saw her sisters. Why had no one else noticed they had taken their masks off? While everyone else was clapping, they stood motionless, their hands linked, their faces mangled and ghastly; the only face she could bear to look at was Lenora’s, bloodless and as pale as her gown. Panicking, Linnetta turned back to her dance partner, and while he still wore his mask there seemed to be no difference between it and the skin beneath. He reached for her hand; the embroidery on the cuff of his sleeve pulsed as if stitched with blood vessels, and the bright lining of her gown was setting her skin on fire.

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I hope you enjoyed my little Halloween story… In the end it really was just an excuse to do some creepy masquerade gowns, but it was fun to write too. Thanks to my husband Brian for brainstorming the original idea with me and editing it.

No thanks to Brian for writing a Python script to vote automatically for fairies 20 times. That’s right, the proper fairy vote count ought to be whatever-it-is-minus-nineteen… That means it looks like literary characters get next week, probably, since I doubt he’s going to try a stunt like that again.

You know I had to do this poll… vote for your favorite masquerade costume!

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.

I didn’t really intend to return to elves for the last day of this series… I wanted to do an Entwife with an orange blossom theme, but I got started too late and my patience with making a dress out of leaves and bark just ran out. You can always tell when I just want to get done for the day, because the dress will be white. No matter how crazy and detailed it ends up, if it’s white, it usually means I started out in a grumpy mood.

Galadriel doesn’t get a lot of description besides “white,” making her good to paperdoll on a grumpy day. I really rather like how this gown turned out, although if I was to redo it I would probably cut off the gauzy middle layer of material on the sleeves.

That makes my seventh costume for Halloween: a whole week of Lord of the Rings, all finished. Uh, those of you who have followed me for a while (like, for more than a week) may have figured this out already, but it’s slightly rare for me to finish up a project so well and consistently: it’s usually one or the other. (See also my poor dancing princesses…) I’m rather proud of myself. Since I don’t think masquerade gowns are likely to be upset at this late hour, I’m putting up a new poll just to satisfy my own curiosity… It’s rather unfair to pit the black and white elf dress against the others, because I think it’ll be lovely when it’s colored, but oh well.

For tonight, here is my version of a female wizard. (My husband called her “Gwendolf” and the name stuck. My apologies.) None appear anywhere in the series, but it is for Halloween and I thought it would be fun… And it was fun, even if I used up a year’s worth of French Grey pencils, even if the end result is a little boring.

My husband heard me complaining and warns me “You should watch out. You don’t call wizards boring. They’ll transform you into a little toad!” I should not like to be transformed, into a toad or otherwise, and so I added cute little hem designs and dialed down the criticism of the grey. If I was sticking to canon I could have given her a blue hat, but the more I look at it, the more I think, well, she looks kind of cool in her desaturated glory… Actually, playing around with hue/saturation in Photoshop, I can make “Gwendolf the Off-White,” “Gwendolf the Lime Green” oh and you don’t want to see “Gwendolf the Electric Blue,” trust me…

I’m afraid this one is going up a little late tonight, but it’s still the 8th where I am. So far I think I’m doing better than last year in terms of paperdoll consistency.

There’s not much reason to put up the poll today too, but I might as well. Don’t worry, fairy fans, I would place money on them taking the third week, if I was a betting sort of gal…

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 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.

So Brian and I watched Firefly and Serenity earlier this year, and I completely fell in love with the show. I haven’t yet seen any of Buffy or Dr. Horrible, but when I heard about Dollhouse I decided that this time I wouldn’t let Joss Whedon’s next potential hit pass me by, and I’ve been watching it on Hulu. I watched the first episode with Brian, and the next few on my own (my husband having bailed muttering jokes about “quantum leap with spas” and so on). Just as the hype had it, the second episode was better than the first, the overall beginning was kind of weak and episode six was tons of fun. The show is about an organization (the Dollhouse of the title) that removes the memories and personalities from their “volunteers” and hires them out as perfect human beings implanted with the personality and skills necessary for whatever job the client wants. In between jobs, the “dolls” are returned to a childlike state (one poster on the Whedonesque blog noted that they sounded a lot like lolcats — I has a book! — and I wish I could unread that because now I can’t not crack up at some lines) and spend the days in comfy clothes, doing yoga and eating lettuce. I’ve liked the subtle costuming so far, even if there aren’t the opportunities for fantasy like there were with Firefly.

I think Topher’s rather put-upon assistant Ivy is going to end up being the programmer Topher talked about in, I think, episode four — Topher seems to think that his rival Yuma Takahashi is definitely a guy, and rejects the idea that whoever disrupted the programming could be a girl when his assistant suggests it, but Yuma is a suggestive sort of name. “Yuma” seems girly to me, and there’s at least one actress with the name, but “Yuuma” seems more like a guy’s name; I wouldn’t expect Topher to know the difference. (The captions had it as “Yuma,” but that doesn’t signify much, I think.) Anyways, that’s my contribution to the rampant speculation, and I hope I’m right because I look forward to her smacking him down at some point. (For some reason I can so see a bewildered Topher with a line like “I thought all their names ended in ‘ko’?” A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.) For her to be the person who contacted Ballard seems like it might be too obvious, though.

Edit, April 6 – on rewatching Grey Hour, Topher says, I think, “Yumio” while the subtitles say “Yuma.” Yumio being a pretty manly name, I’m not so attached to my theory as I once was!

Now, I like the Good Queen as much as anyone, but the vampire always was one of my two favorites ever since she was drawn. (The other was the gypsy girl, who didn’t make it into the finals even though she has the cutest embroidery on the hem of ther skirt.) So the Good Queen took an early lead, but the vampire was always close behind, catching up right near the end, and when I got back from Thanksgiving festivities she had won with a respectable lead, 28 votes to 22 (with Undead Marie in third place with 15 and Christine last with 12). I think the Good Queen must be furious, but as promised, here’s a victory gown for the vampire.

I saw her gown as being an undefined Regency style, so here’s a ballgown in the same vein (I’m sorry, I can’t help myself). I don’t think it’s nearly as good as the first one, but it’s not bad. I’m tempted to do extra outfits for all of the finalists, as I’ve become quite fond of them, and now I have a proper pencil sharpener I bet a good ghostly court dress would be fuuuuun, and not the slog that Undead Marie’s gown was.

So my husband’s business is called Different Chairs, and he does a lot of different things, but chief among them is web development using Django. He has been helping put together a new weather site, JustWeather.com, which just officially launched the other day. What’s so great about another weather site, you ask? Well, it shows real-time, helpful weather information, it has great animated maps that you can enlarge and it doesn’t have a lot of other information cluttering up the screen — just weather, right? Frankly, it has more weather information than most decent humans want to know, and my dear husband has been living and breathing weather for months now. (There’s a reason our new cat is named Radar. She narrowly escaped being called “Haircast.”)

So, in honor of Brian and the weather site, Sylvia and Iris can now brave weather in a cute short khaki trench coat, although you wouldn’t want to brave too much weather in a skirt like that, I guess!

The Good Queen’s undead nemesis seems to be catching up…

This dress is based on one of Charles James’ “Butterfly” evening gowns, although I’m not thrilled about how it turned out. Erin from A Dress A Day linked to an ivory, fall-colored version as an example of her dream dress, and I really like this smoky, pink version. I’m thinking about Erin and her blog today because recently she wrote about a new book Outliers: The Story of Success, condensing it into a sentence: ten thousand hours of work will make you an expert in your field, and it has little to do with being “naturally talented.” That, of course, made me wonder what percentage of that I’ve already gotten through. I estimate I spend one to four hours on each new blog post I make here. For example, the Metafilter dress probably took about an hour, because it’s a very simple design, the post itself is mostly a collection of links, and I wanted to get that sucker posted while the posting was good, not three days later when my Metafilter traffic was all gone. Something more complicated like my version of the Star Princess dress? Probably three hours to sketch out and settle on a design, finish the drawing and write the post; that’s not including the time I spent looking at other web sites to see what other versions looked like. For simplicity’s sake, I think I can average it out to about two hours per post. Between this blog, the 2004 one, the Boutique and all the other paperdoll related things I’ve done, I think I can safely say I’ve put in 800 – 1000 hours towards my 10,000.

I’ve been thinking about success in this way for a little while; I’m used to skating by on natural talent, things I already know and short bursts of inspiration, and keeping up with a project consistently feels very unnatural to me. (Although the Boutique was up for a couple of years, I updated it in bursts, not one a day like I try to do now.) It was actually zefrank’s the show that helped me see value in long-term approaches. He did a short video blog for a year, one every day, writing songs, making jokes, inviting his audience to participate, and some of his videos were OK, a lot of them were great, and a couple of them sublime. My style was usually to do something great in a rush, with all my attention, then to be done with it. (Or as I told one of my friends, I do my best work in the grip of an obsession.) the show was really Brian’s thing more than mine, but I certainly took this away from it: a new video every day for a year, even if it wasn’t the best, delivered a greater impact than ten wonderful videos alone. Ten wonderful paper doll outfits, I can do that easily if I’m in the right mood. Beyond that, it gets hard.

A new paper doll outfit every day isn’t easy for a perfectionist. You all see the cute ladybug costume, I see “wow, one of those shoulder thingies is so much bigger than the other, and the lace is so sloppy, and why didn’t I put in the red first and draw in the black dots later, instead of smearing the black into the red parts and getting the shiny part all messy?” But at last count 11 of you voted for it as your favorite. Wow. Someone like me has to stop and think about that, because it doesn’t make sense from my perfectionist perspective. It says to me, this is a good approach, that that ladybug costume was created and I learned from it and someone likes it, and that makes it OK.

I’ve got a lot yet to learn in my remaining 9,000 hours — how to draw humans, obviously, and their annoying hands and feet, how to make fabric look right, how to get the most use out of my 160-some colored pencils and how to draw delicate seafoam and seaweed to wrap around my mermaids. It feels like it’s going to take a while, but hey! I’m only 26. Hallelujah, it’s a brand new day (a-chicka quack quack)

This poll ends the 21st, so do get your vote in. I’m so curious if Miss Daae will pull through with the win, if the dark horse ladybug will be ahead or if my gypsy girl will have some good luck for once.