Halloween LOTR Costume Series #3: Draped Elf Dress in Pink and Purple

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So I’m not quite sure how I feel about this one. It turned out rather differently than I had wanted it to — I was going for more of a delicate dawn — and I guess my perception of elves is influenced enough by the movies that it seems all wrong. You know, where are the muted earth tones? The fine leaf patterns? The soft, understated fabrics? I can almost imagine an elf mama asking her daughter if she’s quite sure that’s what she wants to wear out to the moon-viewing tonight, and if maybe this nice moss green gown wouldn’t be better? Rebellious elves in magenta, yes, I like that, and even though I played with it some in Photoshop, taking down the saturation and adjusting the colors, in the end I couldn’t do it: I had to present it just as I drew it, brazen coloring and all. If my elf girl doesn’t fit in with the Rivendell crowd, I am sure there is some anime out there she can escape to where she can be happy.

My quiz must have been too easy… The answer was Sunburst Yellow. Unlike Ultramarine, Sunburst Yellow gets used really heavily in almost every yellow or gold thing I draw, and it’s such a cheery, vibrant color that it makes me smile every time I pick it up. So Monica, think about how you want me to color yesterday’s dress and post in the comments please!

Poll is still going… please vote if you haven’t already!

1922 Pink Dress with Burgundy Trim and Lace Panels Inspired by the Adventures of Sally by P.G. Wodehouse

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I’m afraid my dolls generally aren’t cut out for the straight lines that make 1920s fashion look so good, but I did a 1922 dress anyways because I just finished listening to The Adventures of Sally by P.G. Wodehouse, read by Kara Shallenberg. Romantic comedy isn’t so much my thing, but it was amusing (and I often listen to audiobooks while doing things like washing dishes, so amusing beats edifying in terms of audiobook content). And of course Wodehouse is Wodehouse, so it was a fun little portrait of the character of everyone involved. Sally, who of course is the main character, comes into an inheritance early on, so I imagine she went out and bought a couple new dresses, and because everyone spends the rest of the book falling madly in love with her I suppose that they were properly cute.

I really like the idea of doing four main themes for October costumes – give me suggestions and I’ll put up a poll closer to October. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, do see the entry for September 4th.

As for my colored pencil guessing game, no one has hit on the exact number yet…

Nera’s Dress from Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride

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Brian got Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride a little while back, and we traded off turns playing it for weeks. In terms of overall plot it’s pulled straight from the big book of RPG cliches – evil dude wants to take over! only the legendary hero can defeat him! queens are kidnapped! – but there’s two things that really make it great. One is “party talk,” where in different situations (entering a new town or dungeon level, for example, or after talking to most NPCs) you can talk to the characters that are in your group. The amount of dialogue this game must have is staggering – imagine writing a different response for all those different characters! It’s amusing because a lot of the time it’s stuff that you, the player, are probably thinking, so hearing it from another character in their own voice can be a little startling. It really helps make the characters real, too, when they have their own takes on situations or wonder about things that you might not even have noticed. That leads into the other thing that makes the game great: the generation system. You start out as a little kid, then time skips forward and you play as an adult, getting married, and then time skips forward again and your children are old enough to go adventuring with you. So it’s not like your character is accompanied by some random red mage, fighter and white mage: you’re almost always with friends, often with family, and they always have some interesting thing to say. For someone like me, who likes story and character interaction better than battle systems and so on, the game was great fun.

In the DS version of the game, you have the option to marry three women: Bianca, your childhood friend, Nera, the kind and gentle daughter of a rich family, and Deborah, Nera’s haughty and blunt sister. The game pushes you to choose Bianca (you have adventures with her in your childhoods, Nera has another guy that loves her, heck, in the old versions of the game if you didn’t choose Bianca her father died) but you can choose any of them. So I did choose Bianca my first time around, but Nera definitely has the prettier dress, and anyways she’s more my type, if I was a male RPG hero. (Although I suspect that playing the game with Deborah around to talk to is the most fun.)

1944 White Apron with Yellow Trim and Pink and Yellow Flower Pattern on Pink Striped Dress

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Janel pointed me to the Commercial Pattern Archive the other day, in the last days of a one-week free trial, and until the gates were closed I spent hours saving pattern images to my computer and posting excited tweets about the experience. Just like the name says, it’s an attempt to preserve patterns, but the exciting thing for me is just how nicely it’s organized. You see, I’m always listening to audiobooks, figuring out when the story is set and then looking frantically for clothes made not in that time period, not in that decade but in that year. This usually involves a few Google Image searches, a trip through my bookmarks (stored as regular bookmarks, on del.icio.us and in random drafts in my gmail account), and long, windy trails of clicking and then forgetting the location of this or that image I meant to save. This is all my fault, because I’m not organized, and so that’s what makes this site so nice. I say “My book is set in 1921,” click and feast my eyes. Now, is it nice enough that I’d pay $120 a year for it? No, I’m afraid not. Happily, Erin from A Dress A Day has set up a COPA co-op, and I’m in as soon as I know where to send the check.

In the meantime, I sure did save some pretty patterns. This apron is from 1944, and I just adore it, especially that entirely useless little ruffly bit at the hem. The dress underneath is just a basic dress, just the same look and shape as one of the ones on the pattern front, so it should be reasonably correct for the 1940s. Also of note is my late 1800s illustration collection – some day soon when I am alert and not busy and have good lighting I want to do a crazy, flowered, ruffly ballgown or two from that era.

Pink and Yellow Fairy Dress with Purple Corset by Becky

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Today is sort of a guest post! My cousin Becky and I, as I mentioned a couple days before, drew some paperdolls together – she did two, and this is one of them. I love the way the yellow makes the petal skirt look so vibrant, and the detail on the corset top. Yep, my family is cool! Someday I’ll have a paperdoll jam session with my mom, too.

Becky loves her beautiful dresses too, as you see if you look around her deviantart gallery. This one is my favorite, with the gauzy layer on the skirt done so nicely (and the guy’s cloak! Unlike me she can actually draw men) The advantage of paperdolls over everything else, though, is that all I really care about is the outfits! Yep, paperdolls are a superior art form… haha, OK, maybe just for me.

White Prismacolor Tutorial with Retro Ruched Swimsuit and Cover-Up

RLC asked some time back about how I draw white things, and I’ve finally written a tutorial about it. I’d say it’s intermediate, and I hope it’s of use to someone! Read more »

1780s White Chemise à la Reine with Blue Silk Sash and Flower Ornament

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Well, now, it looks like the readers of this blog have what you could call a slight preference for The Duchess’ costumes (a lovely gallery of which can be found at the Costumer’s Guide to Movie Costumes); as I write this it’s garnered 66% of the vote, with the other four neatly splitting the remainder. Not much of a surprise, we do like our fancy gowns around this joint after all. The possible list of leaked Oscar winners would be against us, preferring Benjamin Button instead, but that has all the authenticity of, well, a random list on the Internet.

I didn’t see The Duchess, or, sadly, any of the other Best Costume nominees, but I wanted to draw something inspired by its main character, Georgiana Cavendish, not the least because I recently discovered the The Duchess of Devonshire’s Gossip Guide to the 18th Century (and its counterpart concerned with Marie Antoinette) and since I’ve never been much into 1700s fashion before (I love the 1800s, everything before that I’m real vague on) I’ve been enjoying it. Well, lo and behold there is a style of dress that Marie Antoinette started and Georgiana introduced to England, so that seemed to be the right thing to draw tonight. It’s called the chemise à la reine, and it was quite scandalous when it was introduced in the mid-1780s because it was essentially like wearing one’s underwear out in public, not what one expects from one’s queen. A very simple garment, it was really the precursor of the Regency gowns as the waistline inched upwards.

Don’t forget — livedolling the Oscars here, tomorrow! Stick around the comments section and help me decide what to draw. I’ll be looking frantically for streaming video of the red carpet show (more interesting than reloading Getty Images all the time), let me know if you know where to find 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.

Kaylee’s Pink Shindig Dress from Firefly

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Happy Valentine’s Day, paperdoll fans, and you’ve got to admit that even if it looks like it was bought in a store, this is a delightful Valentine’s dress. Brian and I have been into watching Firefly lately, and we’re almost through the series. (So please don’t spoil anything from the movie or the last few episodes just yet; I know River Tam beats up everyone but I don’t want to know any more.) Kaylee, the ship’s mechanic, falls in love with this dress and gets to wear it to a party. In this very same episode Inara wears what may be the most gorgeous dress ever, but there’s just something about this dress that’s so very Kaylee, and probably instantly recognizable to every Firefly fan.

Don’t be surprised if you see an Inara outfit here too, or two or twenty, because I swear every episode she wears something new that just bowls me over… but for now it’s all about the layer cake dress. Until I revisit the ‘verse, then, do enjoy these Firefly paper dolls. Holly also did two Kaylee outfits for one of her dolls, which you can find here and here. Thanks also to Can’t Take The Sky, a Firefly fan site with great screen captures.

Two Fairy Dresses from Liana’s Paper Doll Boutique

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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: