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:

My husband and I split a CSA share with another family we know, and ours is with the Community Farm of Ann Arbor. (CSA stands for community supported agriculture; basically you pay for a share up front then over the course of the season you get a part of whatever vegetables are grown. For example, our share this week included sweet potatoes, swiss chard, broccoli and twenty bell peppers.) This week, they announced a “goods and services day,” where people could come to show and sell the things they make. I had to go anyways to pick up the share, so I thought, well, why not?, printed off a bunch of paper dolls and brought my drawing materials to the farm. I was the only one who showed up with anything, but it was great to be in the barn working on my dresses, and Annie (one of the owners of the Community Farm) loved them, helping to make up for my complete lack of salesmanship. I think the question I got the most is how I make a living off of them — the answer, of course, is that I don’t, it’s just a hobby. (The text ads do make enough money to cover hosting and replacement colorless blender pencils, which is very nice.) Second most common question was “why paperdolls?” for which the most true answer is, I’m pretty bad at drawing just about anything besides clothes, and I love drawing clothes enough that this doesn’t bother me.

If you like today’s scarecrow costume at all you can thank Annie for saving it; I got about a fourth of the way through sketching it out and was looking at it rather dubiously, but she thought it was so cute, so I kept going with it, and I think it turned out all right. Being on the farm made me think of things like scarecrows, and certainly I had enough reference material for the straw… You can thank Brian, too, for the bird. That’s the first thing he said when I showed it to him, that it needed a bird. Such insights are why I keep him around!

Taken my poll yet?

I can’t tell you why someone who was called “The Good Queen” during her life now haunts a ruined castle of no consequence; queens don’t tell their secrets to paper doll artists. I took on the assignment in the hope of a good story to deliver to my readers, but she condescended to tell me very little about her life, although she was quick to tell me that I had the bodice quite wrong, that I was obviously phoning in the lace, and so on. The older history books paint a glorious picture of her, but I couldn’t help but think that the historians that speculate that the epithet “The Good Queen” was applied to her much like “the Kindly Ones” was applied to the three Furies very well may be on to something. My romantic mind first imagined that she plunged the dagger into her own heart for love, a pre-cursor (possibly inspiration?) to Juliet, and I still think she died by her own hand but the more I sat with her the more I sensed her desperation and anger, and despite her annoyance with my lace, I don’t think it was directed at me. Now I feel her death had nothing to do with love but rather with intrigue of some sort, a power play that went wrong enough to bind her to this world. Still, I’m dying to know what’s with the blood on her hem, but if she will not tell me, fine; in a few hundred years her power will wane further and she’ll wind up telling anybody, probably a bunch of thirteen-year-old girls staring into a bathroom mirror at midnight, just for one last chance at peace.

My poll was a success! Thanks, everyone who voted. While black had a strong showing near the end, iridescent won the day, rather to my chagrin as I haven’t really drawn anything iridescent before… I think it worked out reasonably well, though not perfectly. I based the iridescent part on one of the pearls in this picture.

Mermaids associate the colors pink and red most strongly with weddings and brides, possibly due to red seaweed being a traditional bridal decoration. Pink has a rather old-fashioned feel and deep reds display the family’s wealth, because the deeper the color is, the harder it is to waterproof successfully, and so dark or rich colors weren’t available until more recently and they’re more expensive. These days, mermaid brides tend to choose a shade between pale pink and blood red that they think best suits their tail. (This means that mermaid bridesmaids grumble more than human ones if the bride insists on their wearing the same color; the green-tailed mermaid does not like the poppy red that sets off the bride’s black tail so well, and the mermaid with the light yellow tail feels washed out in the pale pink favored by the silver-tailed bride.) Pearls are also traditional wedding decorations, and a moderately priced rope of white pearls serves much the same function at a mermaid wedding as a toaster does at a wedding for American humans. Different-colored pearls, particularly black and rose ones, are most valued. Red seaweed is, of course, very popular, although seaweed of every type might be used much as humans might use flowers. Depending on where a mermaid lives and on the fashions, other flowers are popular; water lilies are often used in some areas, and tropical flowers such as hibiscus might be more popular in others. Not all mermaid wedding dresses are tattered, but it’s as hard for mermaid designers to resist as lace is for human ones, because of the strong romantic overtones.

For the veil, you will want to cut a straight line between the bottom of the crown, underneath the seaweed, and the veil. This way the doll’s head can be poked through.

New poll for this week:

Before you go on, click here to vote in my new poll, or look underneath the ads on the left-hand side. Either way, VOTE!

Here we have the last of the shiny metal sisters — although I won’t rule out a platinum cousin just yet. (Here’s the copper-tailed sister, and here’s the sister with the golden tail. And don’t forget, you can just hit the “Mermaid Monday” category for all my mermaids.) This mermaid’s tail is silver, and she wears a top made with tattered fabric. You might expect to find more tattered fabric under the sea, but it is actually a design element these days, and not a consequence of water damage. The mermaids use the profits from pearls, coral, sharkskin and rayskin to buy most of their fabric from the elves, who specialize in the delicate, embroidered fabrics that the mermaids adore and have also mastered waterproofing techniques for cloth destined for the seas. The technique has evolved over the years, and now the best fabric treated in this way is still as light and delicate as untreated fabric. It is expensive, of course, but as far as mythological creatures go, mermaids are quite well off; with the exception of their natural predators, they rule the seas and command all the treasure underwater. They also have an amazing pearl-farming setup.

To the mermaid, intentionally tattered clothing such as the shirt the silver-tailed mermaid wears has a sort of romantic, yet melancholy feel. A mermaid waiting for her beloved so long her clothes disintegrate is a common motif, as are the tatters of the martial mermaid battling sharks, or the image of ancient generations of mermaids. This mermaid is part of her kingdom’s Anti-Shark Militia, and she loves to don her favorite frayed shirt for training, her silver tail glinting as she wields her trident.

I play a game called Urban Dead, a browser-based, text-based, player-versus-player zombie apocalypse game. If you play as a survivor, you spend your days hoarding ammo, freaking out about the barricades of your safehouse coming down and often getting killed in your sleep by another player anyways. Those of us who play zombies have much lower stress in our unlives: we have fun and dine on brains. (You can enjoy the benefits, too, if you already play as a survivor! Just stand outside and one of my zombie brethren will hook you up.)

I play one character and I think that before the outbreak, she was a leasing agent. (Having felt rather like a zombie at points during my time as a leasing agent, it’s funny to me.) She used to wear pastel suits and comfortable shoes, and her smile was as non-threatening as it could be. Now she’s overcome her problem of weak, splitting nails with a set of admirable claws, and she’s quite interested in high-density housing units and commercial properties. Her favorite green suit is, alas, a little worse for the wear.

I suppose that in real life, however one chooses to apply the term to a zombie apocalypse, the outfit would be more dirty and torn and less green. What can I say? My time drawing mermaids didn’t prepare me for this. Although… it was nice, for once, to not have to worry about accidentally smudging the red into another color.