Black and Pink Lacy Babydoll Dress with Black Gloves and Striped Stockings inspired by Misa Amane from Death Note

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Brian and I are watching Death Note on Hulu these days. I watch some anime, but mostly only when I’m intensely studying Japanese, so it’s been a while since I’ve watched any just for the sake of watching it. I think Misa is the first “bubbly moron” type of anime character that I’ve ever liked, although goodness knows I’ve seen enough of them. There’s just something about the way she so blithely screws up Light’s game that I enjoy, and I really do feel sorry for her because the way he deals with her must be painful on some level, so she can talk about herself in the third person all she wants and I don’t mind.

This isn’t directly from any of the outfits that she wears, but since she has a sort of sexy goth style (I’m sure there’s a name and a subculture for it) I thought this would be the kind of outfit she would like. My shipment of new colored pencils came today — a couple of the pink ones make an appearance in this outfit, and the lace is thanks to Verithin Cool Grey 70%. The gloves aren’t proper gloves, but come to a point over the hand, so take care when cutting them out.

One more day for this poll…

Smoke Grey and Pink Butterfly Gown by Charles James via A Dress A Day

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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.

1814 White Lace Trimmed Regency Gown with Sheer Overskirt and Pink Shawl from Persuasion by Jane Austen

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Persuasion was one of the audiobooks I listened to earlier this year (again, from Librivox); it’s set starting in 1814, but the time, rather than the book, influenced this dress. Since it’s white, it’s probably considered too young a color for the book’s heroine, but I don’t think I’ve ever done a pure white Regency gown and it sure was fun to draw. This one might as well be titled “Liana Has A New Pencil Sharpener,” really. My old one was probably around eight years old, no wonder it took about two minutes and lots of coaxing to get a point inferior to the ones my new sharpener produces in seconds. It shows, too. Look forwards to a lot of lace in whatever I do next.

I looked at so many sites when thinking about how this dress should be, I can’t list them all, but pemberley.com, the Regency Fashion Page and Jessamyn’s Regency Costume Companion are the ones I noted down for later, so if you have any interest in Regency fashion please take a look at them.

We’re reaching the end of the Halloween costume polls. You haven’t forgotten about them already, have you?

Halloween Costume Series Day 11: Gypsy Girl’s White Tunic with Purple Embroidery, Violet-Blue Paisley Sash, and Pink and Purple Belled Full Skirt

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Violeta claims she makes up all her fortunes like everyone else and it’s not her fault there’s so much bad luck in this wicked world, but all the same her family won’t let her talk in the future tense. She can never get past “I will” or “Tomorrow” before one of her sisters tackles her and claps a hand over her mouth, none too gently either. They resent her because as the seventh daughter of the seventh daughter of the legendary gypsy mystic Simza, she was supposed to inherit the family powers, and since they were all brought into the world to facilitate her arrival there should have been some payoff for them. Instead, they switch off days shadowing her, protecting their family, their friends, for all they know the world from this lightning rod of misery, their uncanny and dangerous sister. Violeta floated the idea once of billing herself as a sort of goddess of curses, and her mother would have thought it a terrific joke for another of her daughters, Zora perhaps, to make up theatrical fake curses and fleece all those who sought to bring harm on others. Violeta, however, seemed to be at the mercy of some demon that hijacked her tongue when she foretold the future, and her mother had better sense than to try to profit off of such a thing. Even the fortunes she told that sounded positive brought only wretchedness. (Would that she had never told Carmen about that darkly handsome rich man!)

Forbidden contact with the future and silenced by the tender ministrations of her sisters, she pours her energy into other things, trying her best to walk straight on a twisted road. She paints and repaints intricate and vivid patterns on her family’s wagons, she knows all the names and uses of everything that grows in the forests, and she makes up wild, violent dances, stamping the ground with the intensity of a curse.

New poll, and rather a silly one. I drew from my Halloween pile, but all my paperdolls are potential warriors here, so if you want Calamity Jane’s trusty shotgun I’m not going to stop you.

Halloween Costume Series Day 5: Green Princess Gown with Pink Rose Trim and Gold Lace

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So what if “princess” is possibly the least imaginative costume for anyone past second grade? It’s pretty, and if there’s anything I like in this world it is pretty dresses. I believe, now, that I may be the foremost non-Disney expert on what makes a dress princess-worthy, for these are the kinds of things one thinks about when one draws lots of paper dolls.

I don’t know much about the owner of this dress except that she does like her roses, and I would be surprised if she cultivates them herself as the owner of this pink princess gown does. No, this princess is a bit of a terror, and she insisted that her dress should lend her a sort of mature innocence, that it should be both heavy and light, serious and frilly, and highly becoming to her porcelain complexion and rich brown hair. It it is no coincidence that her dressmaker took a very long vacation after its completion. But this, I think, is not the kind of princess to worry too much about the anguish of such people. I for one hope the dressmaker got far enough away not to hear about the princess saying, at her next ball, “Oh, this old thing? You like it? It’s just an old rag I had lying around in my closet.”

The veil should be cut between the gold part and the white fabric, such that the doll’s head can be slipped through and the gold band goes around the forehead while the veil flutters behind.

Take my new 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:

Halloween Costume Series Day 4 / Mermaid Monday #6: Pearl Blue Mermaid Costume with Pearl and Lapis Lazuil Strands and Pink Shells

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You thought I forgot about Mermaid Monday! I never forget about things, I just don’t do them and then become consumed by guilt.

The good thing about my October project is that it’s quite freeing not to worry in the least about what time period something is from or if it’s accurate or realistic. I started sketching for my ghost, ending up with something that looked like a ghostly Juliet (hence the reference in the text) and thought, well, is this OK? Is it like something from that time period? Maybe I’d better look it up… Then I realized it was a costume and I had perfect license not to care. Since with my historical dresses I attempt to stay in the style of the times right down to the year without just copying another dress, it can be difficult to do them properly. This month, I’m winging it! and it’s great!

The bad side is that most of my outfits are costumes in some way anyways, so the energy I don’t devote to thinking “is it accurate?” instead goes to “is it a costume?” There can be no mermaid costume in our world better than the costumes Iris and Sylvia already have access to, since our world does require feet. With imagination, most everything I’ve drawn is a costume already and my October project is redundant. (But fun!)

There are plenty of masquerades in the mermaid world, both among the mermaids and on land with the humans and elves, but the mermaids certainly don’t dress up like mermaids and for any of the others to do so would be in bad taste. No, this costume (really just a hobble skirt with ruffles sewn on the bottom) is most certainly from our world, and since here there are no real mermaids to compare it to it does its job well enough. What do mermaids dress up as for their Halloween, you might wonder? Unsurprisingly, they dress as things that scare them or things they aspire to, although mermaid takes on human culture are becoming popular as well. There are three more Mondays in the month, so we’ll see.

New poll on the 8th! So don’t neglect to take this one…

Sarah Palin’s Pink Jacket and Grey Pencil Skirt from the Katie Couric interview

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There has been a good deal of interest in Sarah Palin paper dolls of late; I don’t intend on doing any more, but they do exist elsewhere. Here’s a reasonably respectful Flash game with her, and here’s a more critical take, done as a traditional doll.
And the last in my four-day series of 2008 American presidential election figures, Sarah Palin. This is the outfit she wore for her interview with Katie Couric.

I’ve got some people searching for Palin’s pink jacket, so here’s the image that I used as reference: Sarah Palin Meets With Foreign Leaders During UN General Assembly. There’s more from the same set, which can be found by going to Getty Images and searching for Sarah Palin, date range 9/24/2008 to 9/24/2008. This is also how I found my pictures of the other three, if anyone needs reference for them.

I expected her to do a little better in the poll, considering the splash she’s made in American news for her “sexy librarian” look, but she’s just barely holding her own over Hillary and the pantsuits as I post this! Well, one more day to vote…

Starting tomorrow, I’m going to do a month of Halloween costumes; politicans have been well and amply covered, but please feel free to post other suggestions!

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.