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It is late, but technically before midnight, so technically this post is not late. Go me.
However, it is too late for me to have anything intelligent to say about it. I think, somehow, my adoring fans with survive.
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I don’t usually name my Curves paper dolls, but then I don’t usually need too. In this case it seems necessary, because how could I present the famous Adele without an introduction? Who else has fought for truth, justice and all other noble things while also being a smart young lady with an innate sense of style? With her glasses firmly over her eyes, her walking stick in hand and her gloves loaded, Adele faces off with the Mars Men, the strange otherworldly beings from the next dimension and still manages to lay a proper table for tea. Truly a lady to be admired by us all.
Is it obvious I’ve been spending a lot of time with Victorian three volume novels?
On an unrelated note, one of my goals for the last few days of drawing has been to stretch myself a bit with the paper dolls, so expect to see more pattern and more detail. The plaid on the vest is an example. I’ve always been scared of plaid, but I think it turned out okay.
Generally, I find myself feeling dismissive of “flower fairies”. Complicated and often dark folklore seems to always turn into light children’s stories over time, but I still am a purist when it comes to my fairies. I like them grim and dark and full of blood. Of course, the blood has mostly been taken out to make them more acceptable to most parents (not to children who, on the whole, seem to not mind blood so much). Despite my usual distrust of anything deemed “darling” or “cute”, I began this drawing because I wanted to practice drawing flowers. So, I did and the result is… a lot of flowers.
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Keeping with my own slightly grimmer views on the world of fairies (and yes, I know I could spell it differently, but writing faeries would make my feel like a pretentious git with a need to spell out the digraph), I have done this Curves paper doll’s face very differently from her other paper doll friends. They are mostly human, after all, she is… Other. But as Other as she might be, I can’t stand her chin. I just… think it looks weird. It didn’t look weird when I sketched it…
Oh well, at least her undies are still cute.
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Her hair is my favorite part inspired by the thirties and twenties when women wore their hair in finger waves tight to the skull like Josephine Baker who was an entertainer, exotic dancer, movie star, French Resistance fighter and all around amazing woman. Seriously, cool lady.
And I do regret that my fashions for her aren’t quite as fantastic as a paper doll inspired by the remarkable Josephine Baker deserves, still I had fun with them and I wanted to do something a little retro, but not an actual vintage piece. So… there you go then.
As some of you have no doubt already figured out, I draw ahead of time as much as I can. It’s easier to work in spurts when I have a few hours to devote to the blog rather then doing fifteen minutes here and twenty minutes there. So on Saturday, after I had run my errands and washed my laundry, I settled down in front of some old Star Trek episodes on DVD and drew paper doll clothes for a few hours.
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For next Monday’s Marisole I had my fashion magazines out and windows from clothing websites up on my computer screen. To draw for Florence, I pulled out books of Victorian fashion plates and printouts of doll furniture. But when it came time to draw for Curves, all I had to do was find my thumbnail doodles and put then down next to my notebook. It was entirely liberating not to be bogged down with references.
Of course, it wasn’t as though I didn’t have some limits. The thing about Evil Sorceresses is that it’s a slippery slope and once you are one, you can’t wear just anything. Sure, some might say it’s a bit cliche or even over done, but the Sorceress has to maintain her reputation. And most Sorceresses don’t start bad, they just sort of slide that way. Something about being beautiful and powerful seems to just go to their heads. And once they are an accepted memeber of the Evil Soceress Guild, they can’t wear just anything.
What would people say, after all, if you showed up to a gathering wearing flannel or flowers? Well, flowers are okay if they’re evil flowers. Not, you know, daisies or something.
Mostly, these printable paper doll clothes were an excuse to draw spikes. I like spikes. Also, they are good practice for me. They are also a bit late, but I hope I shall be forgiven.
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I’ve been working nearly full time to make up hours lost while I was in classes. It’s been time consuming, exhausting and I just kinda want to curl up and sleep. Still, I promised myself I would do better with paper dolls and the blog. I hope by trying to schedule more and have more things pre-planned that it will smooth some of the rough edges of things.
Anyway, it is late and I am tired. Enjoy the paper doll.
When I was a kid, I always wanted one of those cakes with the doll sticking out of it. You know, the kind where the skirt is made up by cake and the doll comes out the top. (Here’s a picture, for those of you who weren’t doll obsessed children in the early 90’s) Now, whenever I see the dresses of the mid-1860’s when the hoop was at its widest, I think of those doll cakes. Of course, all fashion is about swings. A item of clothing reaches its most extravagant and then slides out as something else enters to replace it, just as the length of shirts have gone from belly-shirts to tunics in the last fifteen years or so, the hoop skirt’s width moved from all around towards the back until it eventually transformed into the bustle. By the mid-1870’s, it was hard to see how it had ever once been a full hoop skirt.
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The advantage of such a wide skirt is that it calls attention to a tiny waist and the women of this ear were well aware of the allure of that feature, so belts were much in vogue. Curves has traveled back in time for a moment, to embrace this gown from 1861.
Now, I knew I couldn’t fit Curves in period hoops and the size of the skirt on the same image, so I put the paper doll in a modern set of underwear. Perhaps, she is a Civil War re-enactor. That gets me out of the whole- why isn’t she wearing a corset and hoops and all the things a woman in 1860 wore under her dress.
People tell me the secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources, but I always feel weird not acknowledging where I am borrowing material from. This becomes problematic when I honestly can’t remember where I’m borrowing material from. At that point, I suppose I should just give it up.
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It’s a paper doll, after all, not a PhD dissertation and does not need to be footnoted in Chicago style. (Though I confess a strange, possibly worrying, love of footnotes.)
The point of that whole babel is to confess I’m not sure where these two dresses came from. I know I used images from Sears catalogs, but since I had copied them out of the books, I’m not sure. I think they came from Everyday Fashions of the Fifties As Pictured in Sears Catalogs, but I can’t be sure.
And it will bother me for the next ten minutes until I get over it. Fortunately, I have a short enough attention span that such things don’t worry. I save my time for more concerning worries like my grades and the state of my dishes.
(Yeah, I need to get to those.)
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I’d like to say that when I draw things like these, it’s that I actually think wearing them in public would be a good idea unless, you know, you wanted to look like the head of a stud obsessed biker gang or possibly performance art. Still, I think they look cool. I tend to think if I wore them in public I would be asked nicely to go, you know, put on a real shirt.
But I’m perfectly willing to acknowledge guilty pleasure watching of shows like Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and the fact that it creates paper dolls. I mean, drawing paper dolls is a geeky enough hobby without worrying about to much other geekdom coming through.
Quick Announcement: As sometimes happens, real life is going to get in the way of my paper dolling. I try to make these announcements a head of time, rather then just disappearing for a few days. I only kinda succeeded at that this time. PTP will be on break until the 4th of April. Hopefully, not longer then that. See you all then. – Rachel 3/29/2010
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Sometimes, when I’m feeling a little glum, I dress up. I put out my clothing the night before classes (all my classes are in the morning, which is rough) and I wake up early and I get all dressed up. I feel better when I’m dressed up. I find when I’m feeling out of it, I often rely on my sweaters and slacks to just get by each day. But I think when I feel like I look good, my mood improves.
I have no idea what any of that has to do with my blog or these paper dolls, but I just felt like sharing.
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