Back when I first named this paper doll Maeghan. The “real Maeghan” demanded that she have “absurd fantasy dresses.” Well, I don’t know how absurd these are, but I do think they are fairly over the top. Most of my dresses are realistic in so much as they could exist, not in so much as they do or should exist.
I did have fun drawing them. I admit my normal taste is a more towards these sorts of fantasy gowns over the huge skirted things that I drew today. Still it was fun to go wide skirted for once and I might have been influenced by watching Cinderella recently. (Though the Evil Step Mother has far better costumes than anyone else in that film.)
I wanted the full skirts to feel light and almost tulle like. I was thinking about late 1940’s and early 1950s ballgowns like this one and this one as I drew these. Her hair is inspired by the 1940s as well, blame the Evil Step Mother.
I gave her a sword, because I wanted her to be able to defend herself. Plus, she has plenty of room to conceal it among those amazing skirts.
Has anyone else seen the new Cinderella movie? What did you think of the costumes? I really enjoyed them, myself.
Today’s color scheme is based off the Pantone Colors of Spring 2015– though I confess I don’t really like the Pantone colors of Spring 2015. Still, I try to do Pantone paper doll sets, because it gets me out of my comfort zone. Every once in a while, that’s crucially important.
Since the theme of this paper doll set was color blocking, I obviously had no pattern in it. The pieces were based on fashion magazine content that comes out in Spring. While I confess that the color scheme isn’t my favorite, I really like how both pairs of shoes came out and the blue top with the orange and yellow accents. I’d totally wear that top which is not something I can say about most of what I draw for paper dolls.
In the real world, my taste is fairly conservative and leans towards tweed trousers or boho blouses.
I don’t have much else to say about this paper doll set. She’s named Maeghan which I explained last week and you can see more of her with the rest of the Maeghans in my new, Maeghan category. I’d love to say that new exciting fascinating things will happen on the blog in the coming week, but I am pretty sure it will be pretty much just paper dolls.
And while I like to think paper dolls are new and exciting, its hard to argue that they are also what people come here expecting. Surely no one shows up thinking that this place is going to be full of cat GIFs or delightfully trained mongooses.
For the record, I have no idea what you would train a mongoose to do or even if you can train mongooses.
Back when I first drew this base doll for my 1300s paper doll set, one of my regular readers, Jazz13, suggested that I name her Megan.
I have several friends named Megan (spelled all sorts of ways) and I wasn’t sure I wanted to name a paper doll after them. Then, my boyfriend, remarked out of the blue that he thought she looked like a Megan. I was a little surprised and said, “Okay, well maybe…”
Then I spoke to a very close friend and got permission to name the paper doll after her. So, I am pleased to present Maeghan, the new member of the Marisole Monday & Friend’s family.
The friend for whom I named the paper doll wanted her to get to have crazy absurd dresses or clothing with pockets. I confessed the paper doll was already drawn and colored, but promised the next one could have crazy fantasy gowns.
The unusual spelling of the paper doll’s name as Maeghan, rather than the more common Megan or Meghan, was chosen because that’s how my friend spells her name and spellcheck thinks its a misspelling and I’m not sure she’s ever gotten over it.
(When she reads this post, I am totally getting a text.)
Anyway, I hope everyone likes Maeghan and her contemporary wardrobe which does not, I am sure, have enough pockets for the real Maeghan to be entirely pleased.
Lastly, I’d like to mention that it is Memorial Day here in the USA where we recognize those who have served and died for our country in the Military. While I always intend to draw something more fitting, I never seem to actually get around to it. Never the less, I consider it an important holiday and we should take a moment today amongst our barbecues and shopping sales to think about the reason for the holiday.
I won’t be barbecuing, personally. I will be stripping horrid wallpaper off a kitchen.
One of the fun things about doing contest paper dolls is that I really don’t know what people will ask for and I am often surprised. Truth be told, what I know about the Fallout the computer game is that it is a computer game and apparently there are vaults and radiation. That’s about it. Also jumpsuits.
Never the less, my last contest winner asked for a paper doll based on the Fallout games. Now, I have both ethical and legal concerns about violating other artists copyright, so I wanted to be careful how I borrowed from the source materials. Truthfully, more for ethical reasons than for legal ones.
She wanted her paper doll’s hair to be short and so I did my best to accomodate. I don’t do short hair styles very often, because I think I am not very good at them. Never the less, I wanted to do something fun and sort of spiky. The outfits are based on designs from the Fallout Three wiki. I did a jumpsuit, of course, some power armor and some leather armot at her request. I also did some goggles which, as always with goggles and me, might not stay on the paper doll’s head, so I also did some goggles attached to a scarf, wrap, head-covering thing.
I added a few other mix and match pieces. Quite a few pieces didn’t fit the page, so I had to cut them. They weren’t very exciting (a pair of pants and a shirt), so I don’t feel like it is a great loss. One of these days I may have to do a “bits and pieces” set of all the random stuff I have cut over the years. I just don’t think I have ever cut enough to fit a whole sheet. (I can usually tell early if I have “too much” and then don’t color the offending pieces.)
Jintka also asked for, “Purple hair (more on the bluish side), medium skin color, and bluish-gray eyes, please. :).”
So, the paper doll got that color and then I used mostly muted colors for the clothing. After going back and forth about what “medium” meant for skintone, I decided on using Hex #d4aa78 from my Skin Tone Palette. I liked the yellow undertone against the blue in the purple hair.
Lastly, I wanted to note that this base doll is the same as the base doll I used for my 1300s paper doll set. I remain undecided what I will name her, but here she is again. I think she came out very cute in this set and her short hair has inspired me to try out more short hair styles on my paper dolls.
That’s all the news for Monday! Lemme know what you think of the paper doll set or if you have a name suggestion for my still unnamed paper doll.
Last week, we got to see my mid-1300s paper doll set in black and white. This week, here she is in color. Historical printable paper dolls always make me a little nervous. In inevitably, choices have to be made about what to include or not include and how to render a period’s fashion. These choices are easier the more you know about the period and harder the less you know. One of the reasons I often turn to Medieval inspired or Renaissance inspired rather than actual historical paper dolls is the knowledge that I don’t know enough to always make appropriate choices.
What I am not comfortable doing is always trusting the many sites out there that don’t cite their sources with enough detail to actually find the material if you needed it or want to confirm it’s authenticity. While I love the internet, I find that I don’t use it that much when I am doing this sort of research. I seem to fall back on my library training and rely on reputable secondary sources published in scholars with names in the field, backed up my own knowledge of solid collections of digitized medieval manuscripts where I can dig for source images, plus a few tumblers and blogs that seem to know what they are doing.
And this method worked great until I got down the problem of color. Now, I always think of the 1300s as being richly red and blue and gold, because those are colors I have seen in medieval manuscripts. Just because, however, they made a dress red in a book doesn’t mean the dress was commonly red in real life. Pigments used for illumination aren’t the same a pigments used for dyeing cloth and medieval art is heavy on analogy and symbolism.
What I really didn’t want to do was do a ton a research on natural dye processes, because a lot of people have written a lot on the topic. Textile fragments like this one, an incredible velvet cope or this equally amazing cope from the V&A Collections proved to me that colors were rich in the 1300 hundreds. So, I used those images along with this Medieval Colors article from Aux Mailles Godefroy. The resulting colors are a little more muted than was probably possible in the 1300s, but I just couldn’t get over my preconceived notions of muted tones despite seeing examples of bright yellows produced with natural dyes. The truth is that both linen and wool, common fabrics in the 1300s, take dye really well. The world was likely a lot more vibrant than my preconceived notions of history suggest.
By the way, most of my primary and secondary sources for this paper doll set are listed on the black and white version. It was a long list and I didn’t want to repeat it here. So go check that out, if you want to see what I used to create my mid-1300’s paper doll.
Today’s printable paper doll is from the mid-1300s when set in sleeves came into existence and fashion was all about layers and hanging strips of fabric off sleeves called “tibbets.”
There are topics upon which I can speak authoritatively and there are topics where I know basically nothing. I would say that I am fairly knowledgeable about certain periods of Western dress, but there are others that are beyond me. As someone who just isn’t that into the medieval period in Europe (though it is growing on me), I have never spent much time doing research. After last years adventures in the 10th century, I knew I wanted to explore some more early periods and the 1300s seemed like a smart choice.
I settled on the 14th century (or the 1300s), because I’ve been wanting to illustrate that period ever since I stumbled across the entire Roman d’Alexandre digitized from the Bodleian Library which is full of illustrations of ladies in fashionable dress. As I usually do, I cobbled together my decisions about this paper doll from a variety of secondary and primary sources. One website that deserves a shout-out is Illumanu which not only posts manuscript images, actually cites them properly. Makes the librarian in me so happy.
A few specific choices I should note. The pattern on the sidecut surcoat was from Romance of Alexander from the Bodlein Library. The far left dress is based on this casket lid from the Met and the Romance of Alexander from the Bodlein Library folio 181 verso. The green dress on the far left seems to have buttons down the front and hanging sleeves. The other two gowns are mixtures of literally dozens of primary and secondary sources. You can check out below some of the sources I used.
The stockings are scrunched below the knee. I wasn’t able to find any records of garters being worn in the 1300s. The shoes are both from Stepping through Time: Archaeological Footwear from Prehistoric times until 1800 which I would totally buy if I could find it for a reasonable price. I also designed a new face for this paper doll. I like it a lot, so it might become a regular member of the family. I haven’t decided yet. What do you all think?
