A Stylish Paper Doll July: Braids & Strawberries & Sundresses

A black paper doll with braids as a coloring page. Her dress is a crisp empire waisted sundresses with a midiskirt.

Download Black and White PDF | More July Project Paper Dolls

Inspiration:

  • The Attempt to Make a Braid Brush

One of the cool things about Procreate is that you can build your own brush shapes. One of the things I wanted to try was building a braid brush. I tried to follow this tutorial which was excellent, but the results weren’t what I really wanted.

In the process, I became sort of obsessed with drawing a paper doll with box braids- hence how I ended up here with this cute little black paper doll with braids. Because once I get an idea in my head, I tend to try to push through.

Or I don’t. It really depends.

While there’s a few things I would do differently next time, I think the braids came out pretty well. I didn’t figure-out how to make a functional braid brush, but I’m not crying over that. I am not convinced that I like brushes- I mean, I like brushes, but some of the shaped ones are not as useful as I’d have thought if you’d asked me when I started with Procreate. I don’t love how they look and I sort of like hand-drawing things, because I like to draw. If I was working in color, I might feel differently.

I think playing around with the sizes of line gave me a lot of the texture I was looking for and, as a first try, the hair looks pretty dang good. So, I’m proud of it.

Today’s paper doll is part of a series of paper dolls I sketched out all the at the same time (I was in an airport), each of which had a single summery outfit (mostly dresses) and different patterns on their underwear. There will be two more that I’ll share tomorrow and the next day.

For this one, I designed a strawberry and polkadot pattern. There were also flowers, but the flowers looked way too much like the polkadots from a distance, so they didn’t make it to the final finished piece. One thing I am still learning is how thing scale and resize when working purely digitally. The ability to zoom in and zoom out messes with me.

Additionally, this paper doll did inspire me to work on a strawberry themed Lolita dress which I hopefully will finish before the month is out. I think I will. It’s nearly done. I wanted to practice ruffles and that seemed a great way to do that.