The song was slow, and Linnetta found it positively mournful. Her partner seemed to be concentrating on the music as well, dancing ever more lightly to make up for her slow pace and dulled movements.

“Do you really believe that your family is cursed, Linnetta?” he asked suddenly.

“What, did you place a bet on my death too?” she replied, her fingers tightening on his shoulder. “How will I die? A sudden relapse perhaps, or does an assassin lurk nearby? Or will I slip and crack my head during the next song?”

“I’m rather of the opinion that you will live for quite a long time.”

“It’s good to know that someone thinks so,” she said.

Off to the side, Linnetta could see a woman in a sickly green gown whispering to the another woman, the previous arrival in spangled black. Those two together made her uneasy. Undoubtedly they were watching her, but then again so was everyone else. She would have felt elated at all the attention, if not for those women.

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I’m sorry about the delay for today, this dress just was impossible! Hopefully tomorrow’s should go easier. Amelia guessed the contest answer, which I’m embarrassed to say was the Spice Girls, yes, no kidding, I know nothing about them except a couple bars of that one song and that flag dress, but apparently one of them had a gold dress I tried to draw at some point back in high school. And, what’s going on, fairies are losing? I thought for sure they had it this week. Well, vote, 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.

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.

I got an e-mail from one of my readers, Kim, a while back, talking about the designs of Irene Lentz, a costume designer who worked on some Doris Day movies that she recommended to me, one of which was Pillow Talk. I have to do further viewing before I can be familiar with her work, though — it looks like Pillow Talk was costumed by Jean Louis (who, credited for “gowns,” probably designed this costume) and Bill Thomas. Anyways, whoever designed them, I love Doris Day’s outfits in the movie. Her character is an interior designer, and she always looks fabulous: the movie was released in 1959, and her clothes are right there between smart 1950s femininity and 1960s clean style. The movie itself was something I had to kind of turn off the overly serious and feminist parts of my brain to enjoy: I know it’s supposed to be a light-hearted sex comedy, and the way the guy manipulated the girl (and her revenge) was really quite amusing. Still, when viewers are supposed to take the baby at the end as proof that our hero and heroine achieved ‘happily ever after’, it signified to me “she’s got three, four years tops before he gets bored of her.” Yeah, call me a cynic but I can’t watch a movie like that without scripting out a few months worth of premarital counseling for the dysfunctional couple in my head. Doesn’t mean I don’t have the other Day/Hudson movies on reserve at the library…

Wikipedia was never as fun as my Magic Wiki Dress, at least for me anyways. I loved watching things shift from dinosaurs to masquerades back to dinosaurs, and so on. Brian was at Recent Changes Camp 09, a conference at wikis, this last week (which is what inspired the post in the first place) and he reported that Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki, said at the “Creation Myths of Wiki” session that for a wiki to really work, “you have to believe that not done is better than done.” A perfectionist like me doesn’t always get that, but I feel like I did while watching the wiki get edited. I could let it go all year and see what people come up with — and I definitely want to draw some of the other outfits it produced. But to make things simple, I gave it a deadline this time, and this was the last outfit that got posted before noon on the 21st. I don’t like how the sheer purple part turned out, I forgot all about the gloves, the silver scrollwork turned into black scrollwork somewhere along the line and I took some artistic license on the shift, but I think it turned out pretty nicely! It was definitely interesting to draw…

I have a lot of movies coming up in my future, so tell me what Ghibli movies you like and I’ll paperdoll them a bit…

Mermaids are not universally welcome at human balls. In most kingdoms near the sea their presence is unremarkable, but the further inland one goes the less mermaids visit, and the appearance of one at a ball can be a serious disruption. It’s not surprising that they cause annoyance and envy among the human women and prompt duels and inconvenient attachments among the human men, but besides that they are difficult to feed, not always aware of proper deportment and their air of superiority and condescension is often a little hard to take for humans of either sex. One insecure queen went so far as to ban them from all events given during her reign. (Mermaids mostly stay out of human politics, but stung by this, the equally insecure empress of the nearest mermaid empire ensured that said reign would be a short one by secretly inciting treason and eventually civil war in that kingdom. The loss of life and damage to the kingdom was incalculable, but the mermaids got their dances back.)

A mermaid choosing a gown for a ball thrown by humans generally wants to outdo every other woman there, human and mermaid alike, because the most common fault among them is vanity, followed closely by pride. Some of them do it by going with human fashions, thereby beating the human women at their own game, and some prefer to go with gowns designed for mermaids, which tend to evoke the sea, be less formal and hide the legs. (Most mermaids are self-conscious about having legs, as the vast majority of cheap mystics really don’t have the skill or knowledge of anatomy to form perfect ones for very long, so mermaid skirts are inevitably long and loose. The mermaid wearing a miniskirt is the one who gave up her firstborn.) This dress is definitely a mermaid gown; the human women at the ball where this will be worn will all be wearing more elaborate gowns, closer to what I think of as stereotypical princess gowns: tight bodices, poofy skirts. (Although some human women near the sea, where mermaids are more likely to show up to balls, have taken to wearing things mermaids can’t: shorter dresses, gowns slit up the side, tight skirts.) The choli-style top, the lotus and wave pattern, the fluttery aquamarine overskirt all make this gown arresting and otherworldly: just the thing for toying with the hearts of humans, leaving them crushed like a shellfish dropped onto a rock by a seagull. Later the human women will gossip about how revealing and tacky the top was, how unfashionable the whole savage getup was compared to their gowns, but the target of their ire will be already safely back under the sea with new stories to tell.

Yesterday Brian and I went to see Dandia Dhamaka, which was an intercollegiate raas dance competition. Raas is a folk dance from the Gujarat region in western India, and it’s great, very high-energy and fun to watch. (Here’s a video of the University of Michigan group from 2007.) I say “folk” dance but it was a competition between ten college teams, so a lot of the groups worked in cute themes with their introduction videos — one had a Willy Wonka theme, there were two circus themes (probably a source of some consternation) and a couple I couldn’t figure out what precisely the teams were going for because I couldn’t hear very much over the clown with drums leading the “Go Blue!” chant a few rows over. (I was grateful to the group that subtitled their video.) I haven’t found out who won yet, but I really liked the University of Miami’s overall energy, Michigan State University’s choreography and University of Michigan’s costumes.

Of course I loved the costumes in general, which were all brightly colored and dripping with mirror embroidery, bold designs and metallic fabrics. From our balcony seats I couldn’t get a great look at the details (specifically I’m a little sketchy on how the dupatta is fastened to the top of the skirt) but the overall effect was dazzling, especially for the moves where the girls get flipped over the guys, which fans out their skirts. I liked Michigan’s costumes best because they looked sophisticated and very nicely done. The skirts had a huge amount of shiny decoration covering the front, and then the back was only lightly decorated, so the audience saw both the front pattern and the rich-colored fabric as the dancers moved. They kept to just maize and blue, too, but with the guys in mostly maize and the girls in mostly blue there was enough contrast to be interesting. MSU’s group, to me, went over the edge in the costume department: their costumes looked to be the most sumptuous with rich jewel tones and gold accents, but from where I was sitting the men and women looked to be wearing the same thing cut differently, and it was just a little too busy. Still, I liked their dancing best, so let it not be said I’m biased against Spartans!

Anyways, this is my version of a raas dancing costume, although it may not be accurate. The dupatta (the red veil part) was, I think, for most of the girls fastened at the waist, but I can’t really figure out how it works in real life and how to make it work for a paperdoll, so I’m afraid this version is just loose. (Cut it on the black dotted line, below the silver part.)

Anyways! Yeah, hello. Brian says that’s why he never makes New Year’s resolutions, because then you never do them anyways. So I decided to make a New February resolution, which was not to take any guff from my husband. In entirely unrelated news, here’s a paperdoll outfit.

Now, said cobbler’s assistant was actually a wise choice on the part of the Minister of Sorcery. The cobbler himself had encouraged his apprentice to look into a (higher-paid) position with the Sjalfer military, for there was something about his cat-like way of delivering shoes to people and staying under the radar that suggested a potential spy or an assassin. But the assistant himself, whose name was Ced (short for Cedric, but no one called him that), much preferred making things and was rather shy besides. The wordy explanation from the minister left him rather dizzy, but he was already formulating plans before he left the room.

First he visited his master to pick up the slippers that had just been made for the princesses. The cobbler presented a box of them and also a pair of royal blue shoes. “The slippers are for the princesses and those shoes are for you. Special soles, you see,” he said proudly as he turned them over and poked at them. “Wonderful things, muffle your footsteps. Like walking on little clouds, almost. I’ve been working on a pair for the Minister of Defense, but he can wait while you track those silly girls.”

After thanking the cobbler, Ced’s next destination was his mother’s room. The Minister of Sorcery had hinted that returning to the King with no answer might be fatal, and although Ced suspected that this was only one of the Minster’s dramatic flourishes, he had better make his preparations anyways. She was a seamstress, and was stitching away at some golden material as he came in, her hands flying even as he explained the situation.
“My, I can hardly blame them if they have found a way out, even if demons are behind it,” she said disapprovingly. “His Majesty keeps them on a tight leash, yes indeed. You know, I taught Gabrielle how to sew, yes I did, but that was when the Queen was alive, and after her passing those girls got locked up, it seems like. It seemed like a major breakthrough when he first let them out to decorate for Christmas a couple years back! I miss them. You know, I got something for them last year, and I never did get around to applying for an audience… Can you bring them this book from me?” She produced a handsome old book from her closet and handed it to her son. “They do love their fairy tales, those girls. I bought this off a peddler with them in mind. Don’t mention that it’s a year late, of course.”

At twilight, armed with the box, the shoes and the book, Ced hurried to the princesses’ chambers. He had been there before, but only to drop off their finished slippers; being naturally shy and wary, he liked to finish the task as quickly and unobtrusively as possible. So he had hardly ever seen them, much less talked to them, and although he knew their names he wasn’t sure he could tell them apart without looking at their shoes. His mom had taught him the basics of etiquette when dealing with royalty, but all Ced could remember of it was that you kneeled and used titles instead of names. He had developed his stealthy style partially to avoid having to remember such troublesome things.

After announcing his name and mission to the guards at the door, he stepped into the hallway. Usually he would deliver the shoes into individual closets without announcing his presence, but this time he called out “Delivery for the princesses,” and in a moment he was mobbed by twelve young women.

“What have you brought for us?” asked one eagerly.
“The cobbler has finished your slippers, and I’m here to deliver them,” he answered, opening the box and selecting a petal pink pair to pass out first.
“Those must be mine,” one cried, reaching for the shoes. “Pink’s my favorite.” I almost forgot, thought Ged with a great wave of relief, the princesses are color-coded. Juliette likes pink, so that one’s her. He next pulled out a red pair for Perdita and a gold pair for Camellia, and by and by all of the princesses were poking out their feet from under their bell-shaped skirts and admiring each others’ slippers.

This dress belongs to twenty-three year old Daphne. She isn’t as smart as Perdita or as wise as Camellia, and she’s even more passive and shy than either of them, so she often feels a little overshadowed and put-upon. She has a romantic soul and a refined aesthetic sense, and she loves to be by herself, writing poetry and drawing. She’s kind, but not overly friendly with any of the princesses except for Juliette, as the two of them have collaborated in writing songs and lyrics for several years. Her favorite color is violet, and her favorite flowers are moonflowers.