This project has been a long time in incubation. I drew my last Marcus 1.0 paper doll in July of 2013. He never looked right to me and he was out of proportion to the smaller more delicate Marisole, Mia, Margot, and Monica.
In the end, I took K’s and Julie’s advice and resized him in photoshop. He got skinnier and shorter. His head got smaller. I printed out the heavily altered version and sketched it up on lined paper as I do when I am testing a paper doll template. I altered it some more. I redrew the face about nine times.
And I’d given up on redoing Marcus 1.0 until I got some really nice comments from my readers asking when I was going to post another Marcus paper doll.
Well… no. He’s got pretty defined hips for a man and he does look a bit girly. Still, I’m more pleased with him than I ever imagined I could be with a male paper doll.
In celebration of his debut, I decided to post both the black and white and the color versions this Monday. I am very proud of how he came out.
I don’t have anything Halloween organized for Halloween this year. I am trying to get something done in time for Friday, but I wouldn’t hold my breath anyone. Instead, I offer a rare male paper doll to grace the collection of Marisole Monday & Friends.
I have big plans for Marcus. I’ve already drawn a fantasy set for him and I’m working on a steampunk airship mechanic set. I’m actually having more fun with my male paper doll than I ever thought I would.
The fascinating thing about paper dolls (or perhaps one fascinating thing) is how the medium of “paper” can effect the actual playability of a paper doll set. You can fold paper, so tabs are used to hold on pieces. Paper is easily cut to make slits for hats.
Magnetic paper dolls require a different thought process. Hats can not be tucked behind the doll, for example. There are no tabs and collars can not “wrap around” the back of the doll’s neck. Everything has to stack neatly on top of each other.
Sometimes people ask me if I would make the Flock a “paper” paper doll series, rather than a magnetic paper doll series. The answer is no. Flock was conceived to be made of magnet and their outfits just wouldn’t all work as paper set.
Today’s magnetic set features a dabble into Noir Punk by Pheobe, one of my other Flock magnetic paper dolls.
I had a very good childhood friend named Phoebe and it’s after her that I named this paper doll (though I have to confess the paper doll looks NOTHING like Phoebe.) I love the blue hair against the light brown skin tone and I really want her hats. Hats make everything better. I wish we still wore hats, except I look terrible in hats.
All the pieces on this wardrobe page and intended to be mixed and matched with all the pieces on Wren’s Noir Punk pages. I don’t think I did as good of a job on this set as I did on my Starling Punk Noir set. I have to give that some thought. In the meantime, enjoy the magnetic paper dolls. 🙂
Also, if you need instructions on how to make magnetic paper dolls, I explain too methods in my Magnetic Paper Dolls Tutorial.
Among other things I did last night, I took the time to tabulate the number of pages of paper doll content on the blog and update my sidebar. I’m up to 527 pages of printable paper dolls, including my magnetic paper dolls and my random stand alone paper dolls. Yay!
So far this year, I’ve posted 44 different Marisole Monday & Friends sets. For anyone interested, that’s 19 sets in color and 25 sets in black and white. Today’s set in color is totally a favorite. I love her braids, the color scheme and how her bow came out.
So, when I finished a bunch of Marisole Monday & Friends paper dolls, I was initially totally proud of myself. Now, it’s several weeks later and I truly couldn’t tell you what I had planned on saying about this paper doll set when it really comes down to it.
I suppose I could say something about how the colors are based on the sunset or about how important I think it is to have fantasy characters with brown skin, but really I don’t know that I haven’t already said all of that before.
I could also express my shock when I once asked a student what she was doing over the weekend and she told me going to the salon to get micro-braids put in.
And I said, “But that won’t take your whole Saturday.”
And she said, “Yeah it will. About six hours.”
And I was stunned into silence.
So, let us hope that the elves have magic or something to speed that process along. If I had magical powers, I would totally use them to make sure I never had a bad hair day and also do my dishes. If you had magical powers, what would you use them for?
Back in the early days of the interweb when I built my first, and perhaps best forgotten, paper doll site, images were generally small. They look a long time to load and things like Pinterest didn’t exist- neither did really any Social Media.
In those days images were best kept small, but today we can get away with much larger images and I like large images. They are pretty. One of the things I have been doing is working on reformating a lot of the images on the blog to be larger and easier to see.
This is a very long way of saying that today’s Flock magnetic paper doll post is in a different format then my other Flock posts. Let me know what you think in a comment…
Meanwhile, I am dabbling again with Noir Punk, or as I think most know it, Diesel Punk. Personally, I like my name better. Basically, it’s vintage styled clothing of the 1930s and 1940s combined with a punk aesthetic.
I do not offer a link to the PNG to print for my magnetic paper dolls, because you shouldn’t print them from the PNG. The PDF allows the image to be properly sized to the page and therefore to the dolls.
Anyway, here is Wren, named for a bird, showing off her shoes and hats. I really do like the hats and I think they are fun for the Flock magnetic paper dolls. Magnetic paper dolls are fun.
Wren is here with some retro clothes and corsets, because that’s what everyone needs. I love the boots, personally. Next week, there will be another set of these with Wren showing off page two of these outfits.
I’ve dabbled in this style before and you can see that Starling set of Punk Noir if you like. I’m not sure how I feel about the colors on this set, but for the moment, I like them.
Last week, as you may recall, I posted my Court Alchemist paper doll. This week I am posting three more printable paper doll dresses and two pairs of shoes which gives her five outfits in total. I really do think the clothing makes the paper doll. I was always that kid who would have rather have had dozens of outfits over dozens of paper dolls.
In fact, I remember when American Girl magazine published paper dolls and I used to get so annoyed that the dolls were “almost” in the exact same pose, but not quite. So, they couldn’t perfectly share clothing. Drove me just nuts as a kid. Here is a picture of one of the paper dolls.
Are there any children’s magazines left that still publish paper dolls?
I recall with much fondness the feeling to getting to check the mail for my American Girl magazine and it’s promised paper doll. In fact, if you want a similar experience (and you have an HP web enabled printer), then you might consider my HP Paper Thin Personas Printer Ap which prints a full color or black and white paper doll every Monday, automatically. You can also print the paper dolls on demand directly from the printer which is, I have to confess, pretty neat.
So, there are three dresses in this set. In my head, these are all fairly informal dresses. And who doesn’t need socks held up by some odd sock suspenders? (There is something inherently hilarious to me about sock suspenders… I might have a problem.)
I went back and forth about the patterned dress. I wanted it to look like a pattern that could be woven on a simple loom, but it ended up looking sort of like abstract eyes and now all I can think is, “The dress is staring at me…”
As for tools, along with last week’s tool collection, this set adds a sextant, which is a tool for measuring the angle between any two visible objects, most often the horizon and stars. It was crucial for navigating back in the days before high levels of technology. As a girl with NO sense of direction, I am totally grateful to whoever invented GPS. If I had to navigate via sextant, I think I would end up lost way more often than I already am.
So, Friday there will be another page of Her Ladyship and Monday there will be an elf.
Meanwhile, you can follow me on twitter @paperpersonas for blog updates, random paper doll thoughts, and a smattering of librarianship.
So, with last week’s paper doll I spoke a little about why I decided to dabble in the Southwest trend this season and today I wanted to show off the colors I used for the paper doll set. I knew from the start that I was going to be using a desert inspired color scheme. It is the Southwest, after all.
As a child, we visited the Grand Canyon. I will always think of reds, browns, ochre and sandy khaki when I think of that landscape. I confess to not being much of a desert person by nature; however, I do think they can be astonishingly beautiful.
I did not want to fall into the trap of just using a monochromatic warm color scheme though, so I also decided to include a pale turquoise, a very pale bayleaf green and a darker green for contrast. Normally I try to keep my color schemes to five colors, but this set needed a lot more. (I blame it on that patterned pencil skirt.)
Obviously, I am embracing the fantasy options for my paper dolls today. Actaully, I have been really paper doll productive over the last few weeks and have managed to get a lot done as far as wrapping up old projects. This set is actually the first thing I drew in my current sketchbook and I am now, finally, getting it posted live on the blog, several months later.
Next week there will be a page two of this set with three more dresses, two more pairs of shoes and some other accessories. Sometimes, I get into something and draw more than I mean too. Also, I am still learning with B&B paper dolls how many pieces I can fit on one page.
To give credit where credit is due, I was inspired by this gown from Armstreet which is entitled The Alchemist’s Daughter; however, why be the daughter when you could be the alchemist? I would way rather be the alchemist than be the daughter of the Alchemist.
Oddly enough, Alchemy was considered serious business for hundreds of years. Newton, for example, was an alchemist (he was also a bit of a crazy dude and stuck needles in his eyes to test various optics theories, but that’s a whole different issue.) Probably the earliest attempt to clarify chemistry from alchemy was Robert Boyle‘s Skeptical Chemist (1661) and we can either thank or blame Boyle for helping found modern chemistry. As someone who hated chemistry in high school, I confess to mostly blame Boyle. Never the less… important chap.
My favorite part of drawing this paper doll set was getting to draw the accessories. I imagine this alchemist is also the court astrologer. Astrology, mythology and religion were all wrapped up in alchemy theories. Our alchemist has an astrolabe, a tool for predicting the star and planet movements, a falcon, a tool for hunting small mammals, and an armillary sphere, a tool for modeling the planet’s movements. Most of the symbols on her bottles are actual alchemical symbols. So, that was fun to research.
The dress on the left is more of a work dress with a heavy leather apron for protecting her gown from spills and the dress on the right is more of a formal costume with the fancy chain belt. Also, she has some closed toe boots in case of spills of mercury and other things.
Next week I will show off her other three dresses, also more tools and some other rocking shoes. On that note, I am going to go to bed. 🙂
Last week, the circus came to town in black and white for coloring, but here the paper doll set is in full color. I am really very pleased with how she came out. Sometimes, I know what I am doing with a paper doll set before I start coloring. Other times, I have no idea what I am going do with colors. In this paper doll’s case, I had a pretty clear idea of where I was going to go before I got there.
One thing I noticed as I was collecting images on my Dark Circus Pinterest board was that there was a bunch of red and black. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with the red and black, but I knew there was going to be a lot of it.
Creating a red and black paper doll set was kind a boring, so I did not go with a strictly red and black color scheme (though there is a lot of black and white here).
With straight red, black and white, I got bored very quickly and worried about the scheme clashing with the paper dolls pink hair. Instead, I decided to try basically creating two sets in one. There is a black and red set and also a pink and black set. Both sets had a pair of shoes and there are some pieces which can be worn with either color scheme.
I think this effect of “two sets” in one works, because circuses are all about costumes and costumes tend to match more than normal clothing.
So, today the Poppets paper doll series is traveling to the 18th century and rocking some beautiful clothes. One of the great myths of historical costume is that children in the 18th century were dressed “just like adults” and while there is some truth to the fact that children wore very similar clothing to adults, it was rarely identical. Skirt length is a common way to tell that a dress was intended for a child, rather than an adult, along with simpler lines and decorations.
I must have colored and re-colored today’s Marisole Monday & Friends paper doll set, a dozen times before I settled on this sort of dusty teal, cream and rose color scheme. Seriously, sometimes paper doll coloring is really quite frustrating.
I do love the way the paper dolls look when they are colored and I like choosing colors and playing with color schemes. I don’t think I could ever switch to just black and white.
I really wanted to do a sort of classic princess/fantasy look with this set. I don’t generally draw thinking about children, but sometimes after I’ve done some of my stranger paper dolls (like the dark circus paper doll I’m working on), I find I want to also do things that are strictly for kids.
Of course, I also stand by my rule that if you don’t think one of my paper dolls should be given to a child, than don’t give it to a child.
The next things down the pike are going to be a historical poppet set later this week and then a Marisole circus set and then I’m honestly not sure… Flock need some love and so that might be the next thing to work.
Over the years, I have done a fair number of steampunk or neo-victorian inspired sets of paper doll clothing. I’d name them all, but I really don’t feel like digging through the blog’s massive archives to track them all down.
Generally, I see the whole steampunk thing as an version of the Arts and Crafts movement of the 19th century. A sort of call back to a fantasy of an analog time while ignoring major issues of the actual 19th century like lack of labor protection, colonization, and treatment of the mentally ill (to name a few), just as the Arts and Craft movement exalted the medieval and gothic periods while ignoring the plague. Within reason, I don’t find this troubling though sometimes I do worry that when we exalt certain periods of history, than it is far to easy to ignore their horrors.
And every period of history, including our own, has a few horrors.
Still, I have always found alternative fashion movement fascinating, be it goth, punk, steampunk or the dress reform movement and therefore have every intention of continuing to draw neo-victorian clothing for the blog.
Somehow today’s set got awfully Christmas looking with the red and the green color scheme. I was thinking more burgundy and olive while I started, but it came out a bit brighter than I’d intended it to be. Despite the small number of pieces in this set, there’s actually 18 outfit options and more if you include the shoes each of the Ms. mannequin paper dolls come with.
Okay, quick question to my readers. I’m debating working on Flock stuff this coming weekend or working on Pixies. Anyone want to express a preference?
Well, I have been working on backend server CPU issues with my shared hosting service. Nothing really serious, but stuff that has to be dealt with for the blog hosting to continue to be cheap enough for me to justify continuing to keeping it online and free.
Still, I owed a paper doll to my last drawing winner, Lina of Lina’s Historical Paper Dolls, and I was not about to put off finishing that for another week, because I would keep feeling guilty about it.
Lina requested an 1880s period Marisole Monday & Freinds paper doll with a ballet outfit and several other dresses. I had some trouble getting all the pieces to fit on a single page, so I omitted some shoes from the image.
Should you want proper shoes to go with this set, then I recommend checking out On the Board Walk in color or black and white or Mia Goes to the Bathing Place in color or black and white. Both of those sets both have button up style boots which, while not period, are close enough to not look totally awkward.
Lina was kind enough to send me reference photos and specific colors for the hair, skin and eyes of the paper doll, but left the color scheme mostly up to me. I wanted to use some rich colors, because by the 1880s chemical dyes were common and rich colors were very much instyle. There is a habit to think of the 19th century as sepia colored, because of sepia photos, but it was actually a rather garish era.
So, Lina also asked for a tutu based on this painting by Degas. The painting dates from 1871, a little earlier than the other costumes in the set. I omitted the sash, since I based the dress on the center figure. I don’t think the layers of the skirts really look like tulle, which bothers me. Liana has some great tulle on her blog.
The ballgown was based on this fashion plate. The gown was red, but I made it peacock blue based on a description in English Women’s Clothing in the 19th Century by Wilett-Cunnington that mentioned peacock blue ballgowns. I hate drawing lace, but it came out all right, I suppose.
The last two outfits are a swimming costume and a house dress. Old swimming costumes were extremely complicated and not very easy to swim in. Generally, I think of them as wadding costumes. Lina sent me this picture and I based it off that.
The house dress is classic 1880s style with bustle, drawn up skirt and long pleats. It’s a pretty typical gown for its period. Lina sent me this photo and I based the dress off of it. I omitted the pattern on the dress, because I knew it would reproduce poorly in the small scale of the paper doll set.
And that, as they say, is that.
If you haven’t ever checked out Lina’s blog, Lina’s Historical Paper Dolls than I recommend taking the time to do so. She makes wonderfully interesting historical paper dolls.
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