When I was a child, I always wanted one of those cakes which had a doll inside of it, but I didn’t like Barbie dolls, so I don’t know what I would have done with one if I had gotten it. I was reminded of them as I worked on this set of paper dolls. Marisole doesn’t have a lot of huge skirted dresses. I think because I more often take my inspiration from the Regency then from the Antebellum eras of costume. Never the less, I knew I wanted to draw some things that were utterly over the top and I think these qualify.
I don’t usually start knowing a color scheme, but in the case of these dresses I was pretty sure I wanted them to be yellow from the beginning. Because the dresses were going to be yellow, I chose a warm pale brown color for Marisole’s skintone and a dark color for her hair. I was really concerned with her skin clashing with her costumes. I don’t think it does, but I was worried it might.
I have, as I sometimes do, left this to the last minute. So, now that its posted, I am going to crawl into bed and sleep for I have work and homework to finish in the morning.
I’ve been thinking about doing Harry Potter paper dolls for a while, but have be resisting the urge because I always felt like Marisole looked as though she was too old and so did the other paper dolls on the site. To me, Marisole will always be in her early-20’s and that means dressing her up as a student takes on kinky connotations. Not a place I wanted to go with my paper dolls. While I’ve always thought of Marisole as an adult, I’ve always thought of Pixie as a teenager (late teens, but teens never the less). So, it made more sense in my head to do Pixie as a Hogwarts Student for my Harry Potter foray.
Since I didn’t feel like drawing the same thing over and over again, I decided to do four different sweater and shirt combos- one for each house. The school uniform aspect of Hogwarts garb is a movie creation, since I don’t recall anything beyond a black robe ever being described in the books. Though most schools in the UK do have uniforms and, while I didn’t have a school uniform as a kid in the US, I did enjoy watching the kids stream out of school in their uniforms while I was living in England. It never ceased to amuse me.
Actually, the Hogwarts uniform have changed subtly with each movie, taking on a darker feel as the movies have gotten darker. Rather fascinating really, if you have more time then you know what to do with and you’re easily amused -or watching them in a row while drawing your Harry Potter paper doll.
Of the four sweater combos, I think I like the bronze and blue Ravenclaw one the best. I like the colors and I like how it came out. I should say that I didn’t really plan which sweater would be which house, it just sort of happened without me thinking much about it.
I think the doll looks either Latino or perhaps East Indian would be more fitting given that the school is in Scotland. Maybe a relative of the Patils… Hard to say.
I love contrast of heavy structured pieces with light draped pieces. So, I wanted to sort of play with that and draw nifty harness looking things. See… I was trying to justify my wacky-ness with some sort of artistic statement, but I don’t really take myself that seriously.
On a semi-unrelated note, I’ve become rather obsessed with Blythe dolls lately. At first, I thought they were creepy- all big eyes and weird mouths, but lately I’ve come to actually think they are sort of cute. Mostly I like their little tiny clothing. Not surprising to anyone who knows me, I’ve always been more of a doll clothing, then a doll sort of person. The same is true for paper dolls. As a child, I was just as happy to have just one paper doll and lots of dresses (if not more happy) then to have a lot of dolls.
I’d like to do some sort of Blythe paper doll, but I’m still working on keeping up with what I’ve committed too and I don’t think I’m ready for that quite yet. If I do decide, it might not be serial which brings back the “What to do with non-serial” paper dolls problem.
On an utterly non-related note, I am now going to walk away from my laptop and curl up on my couch with fresh sweet corn and Harry Potter movies. Summer classes are over and life is good.
Today we have Alyssa’s partner in crime, Bianna. I spent a while debating if I should post clothing before I posted another doll, but in the end the other doll won out, mostly because I’m rather in love with her wigs and her lips.
I promise next week there will be some clothing, so the poor girls aren’t running around in their girdles for too much longer. I’m having a lot of fun digging around the Vintage Pattern Wiki looking for dress ideas while fretting about how I don’t like their feet placement.
Oh, well, I don’t think I’ll ever have a perfect paper doll. 🙂
Bianna is not named after anything or anyone specific, except that her name starts with B and I liked how it sounded. Do cut along the dotted lines on her wigs and by her arm to help her wear her costumes. I’ve spent the last few days working hard to finish up assignments for my summer course work and I must confess I have little intelligent to say in this blog post, so enjoy the paper doll and, as always, I love to hear what people think.
I did a few different things over the weekend and during the week of blog neglecting (actually, I wasn’t neglecting the blog, I was just busy with a lot of other things for the blog, that weren’t ready to be posted). So, I have a few things to talk about today. I have rewritten my FAQ. I’ve added a few more blogs, not paper doll specific, and removed a few dead links from the Links page. Obviously, the menus have been reorganized. One of these days I will over-haul the Gallery page. I don’t like it. I don’t know what to do with it. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now I’m dissatisfied with it. I need to think about it.
I’d kill the Gallery if I knew what the heck to do with the content already posted there. Decisions decisions.
So, I should say that this new paper doll series evolved out of the number of comments I had from people who really liked the shadowed style of paper dolls. I was surprised by the interest in them since I’d always thought I was the only one who liked those paper dolls. How wrong I was.
The truth is that I began this series a long time ago, but never posted it since I didn’t know how to fit it into the schedule and then recently when I looked at the bulging folder full of drawings and the ones in my sketchbook I was really quite proud of, I thought, “I’m bored with Flora. I avoid drawing for her. Just got for it.”
And here we are today with a new paper doll series. I’m excited and pleased (and have songs from the musical Into the Woods stuck in my head, but that’s got nothing to do with this post) and I’d love to hear what people think, as always.
When I started this blog, the temptation was to name all of my paper dolls after Greek letters. So, there could be Alpha and Beta and Omega and others. However, I decided that they would end up sounding like some sort of strange paper doll SWAT team.
On an only slightly less surreal note, I have decided to give each of the Curves 2.0 dolls a name based on a letter of the alphabet. So, today we have the first paper doll. Her name is Alyssa. She’s a redhead for I openly confess to having a soft spot for redheads. Her skin looks overly pale on some computers and normal on mine, so I can’t really say much about that. I’ve decided to call the paper dolls “Dictionary Girls” after the idea of “Calendar Girls” which dates from the tendency for there to be pin-ups on calendars.
The plan is to have another paper doll for next week and then some clothing for them the week after so that aren’t running around in their underwear, poor dears.
PS: To everyone who wanted these dolls to be done in the heavily shadowed style of the old Curves sets, there’s another new series starting Friday which will replace Flora and will be in that style.
It is entirely possible that my least favorite part of posting paper dolls is coming up with the title. (Adding tabs is a close second on the list of least favorite activities, I should just draw them rather then using Photoshop. I don’t know why I insist on Photoshop. It just makes things more annoying.) I think I might just start numbering the things. Or using some strange code…. Seriously….
So it’s very late and it’s been over 90 here for the last week. I am hot. I am sweaty. I am dying from a combination of humidity and heat. We had a thunderstorm this morning which woke me up and dropped the temp, so that it was only 90 degrees today. How nice.
It’s times like this when I miss the cold damp climes of my Alaskan home.
Anyway, enough about the weather. There are paper dolls. They are wearing stylish fantasy dresses. These dresses were inspired by the Renaissance in the same way Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame was actually inspired by the novel, which is to say only in the smallest and slightest way. Truly, I don’t know what Disney was thinking turning a book in which all of the main characters die into a children’s film, though I recommend the novel to anyone who has a really long plane ride and doesn’t mind being depressed during it. Does it show that I’m not a huge Victor Hugo fan? In the novel’s defense I should say the language is beautiful, but the plot is rather depressing. I can’t fault Hugo’s skill as a novelist, but I’d rather read Dumas.
Hmmm… I think that’s enough literary criticism for one blog post. Enjoy the paper dolls. (You can decide if she should die in a mass grave while clutching the dead body of her love. I won’t judge.)
I have to confess some shock about the level of interest and excitement with the Star Trek Marisole paper doll on Monday, and then of course, I neglected the blog for a bit. Still, these things happen and I am back now with a wedding dress for Flora. The dress with it’s matching spencer jacket is based on a costume from the Victoria and Albert Museum . I sort of rambled on about the dress in a post I did about spencers and how much I adore them.
Do people care about these sorts of random historical fashion things? I never know if I should be straying so far from the topic of paper dolls… I’m still divided about the “posting pictures from my sketchbook” idea. It’s kinda fun, but, again, I’m not sure people enjoy them. Well loyal fans, what do you think?
Oh, and I spent some time tonight fixing some link problems some of the Magnetic Paper Doll images were having. If you like magnetic paper dolls, you can check out my directions and images on my Magnetic Paper Dolls page. More magnetic clothing sets will be forthcoming as I get them ready.
She is the reason I love Star Trek and part of the reason I love paper dolls. When I was a child, I was allowed to stay up half an hour later with her to finish watching Star Trek: The Next Generation if my teeth were brushed and I was in my nightgown. When I was in middle school, I started watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Recently, I have begun to watch the original series on DVD from the library. In short, I am a bit of a Trekkie- though I like to think a fairly harmless one.
I am sure true die-hard Trekkies could tell me everything that I got wrong on these paper dolls, but I can’t really be bothered to care. I will say this though- finding a decent reference photograph for the shoes worn by those characters was a pain in the behind and I’m still not sure I got them right. Oh well, you win some and you lose some. Feet are not often shown in television episodes.
I heard somewhere (trustworthy source that) that there was a rule in Star Trek that you weren’t supposed to show any fasteners. I don’t really get why. I mean, lacing up clothing has been done for centuries, not to mention buttons. I figure people would hard pressed to invent a better system, but I suppose it does subtly convey the sense of “futuristic” in an interesting way.
I’ve never done a black and white Pixie paper doll before, that I recall and I must confess I’m only doing one now because I’m busy and I needed something to post. I felt a little guilty just posting paper dolls I had already posted in black and white, so I did two of them to make myself feel a little less guilty about recycling material. Besides, sometimes the choice is between something or nothing and I’d rather post something.
I’ve been terribly busy this weekend prepping for classes that start next week and preparing to travel to Pennsylvania for a wedding. I’ll be out of town for a few days. The blog should post on it’s own without me (assuming I get done what I need to get done to make that happen), but there might be a slight hiatus while I travel.
I enjoy weddings, though I was never one of those people who dreamed about my own wedding day. I never caught the “wedding fever” so common to young girls. I did have a wedding Barbie doll, as I recall, but I think she spent most of her time either fighting monsters or going to balls in her pretty white dress.
1. Archery was actually a common sport among upper class women in the early 19 century. Along with riding, it was one of the few athletic activities women were allowed to do. Flora’s archery dress is based on one from the Manchester City Galleries.
2. It is entirely possible for me to completely forget what day it is and therefore mess up my planned Curves post. (Sorry guys. It’ll go up next week. My bad.)
3. There are more people interested in a colored version of 2.0 Curves, then a black and white shadowed version, but the shadowed people are much more vocal… Hmm… Who should I listen to? Maybe I’ll outline it and try it both ways… My concern with shadowed has to do with what I feel like is a loss of detail due to the shading… I need to give it more thought, obviously.
Speaking of the Curves 2.0 epic adventure, I hope to have the new series up sometime before the end of the month. I don’t like starting a new series without at least a few posts drawn and prepped. It means I’m not struggling with keeping it going. That’s all the news for now. Enjoy Flora’s Archery and Evening Dresses.
To celebrate the 4th of July, I thought I would check out books from the library, sit down and set to work on drawing some historical costumes for Marisole set in the 18th century since the Revolutionary War (Or, as the Brits call it, the Rebellion of the Colonies) was in the 1770s. I’ve only done one other set of historical costumes for the paper doll and they were regency dresses (One set one in July and one in August in 2010). This is about as far from the Regency aesthetic as you can get- the French Revolution did have a way of changing fashion, also of decapitating an awful lot of people. Those wiley French.
So, I’ll confess that when I have to name my favorite periods of historical fashion the 18th century doesn’t get a lot of attention. I’m just not that huge of a fan, but when I was in England I went to the Fashion Museum in Bath and I saw an actual 18th century gown in person. Despite my tendency to dismiss such costumes as too poofy, too over the top, too absurd for my taste, the actual dress was among the most astonishing pieces of craftsmanship I have seen.
The frustration of drawing historical costumes for Marisole is that her proportions are so darn strange. While I like how she looks, it means that historical dresses (which rely on a specific silhouette) look off. As I drew these costumes, I realized I was going to a have to allow myself to be a little more liberal then my natural leaning for historical accuracy allows and, besides, I don’t really know enough about the 18th Century to be hyper critical of my own work. I won’t say these costumes are historically accurate, I will say they are historically inspired.
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