Ramblings

“Klippdocka” is Swedish for Paper Doll…

paper_doll_around_the_webOne of my readers, Erin, reminded me that klippdocka is the word for paper doll in Swedish (since I did that post on Påklædningsdukker) and so that sent me scurrying off to image searches (I actually like Bing more than Google for this sort of thing) and I found a lot and got reminded about a blog I’d rather forgotten about, despite having it on my links page.

Anna’s Blog hasn’t been active in a few years, but since the archives are available, its worth checking out. Her paper dolls are beautifully rendered in pencils and markers, always full color and vibrant. Her main paper doll has incredible historical costumes (this is my favorite) and she has other beautiful paper doll sets as well. I can’t say enough nice things about her work, and I wish she was still blogging with us.

Other Swedish dolls about include a vintage aesthetic paper doll by Agnes Brandels and a Fröken Hallonsemla paper doll with a really cute cat.

Here’s a high fashion paper doll and here’s one that is a ballerina paper doll.

A 30th birthday paper doll with a great Hula outfit is pretty funny.

Vintage style pin up paper doll, safe for work, I promise… and another vintage feeling paper doll named Emily with jumpers, lots of jumpers.

I have noticed a lot of vintage styling in these Swedish paper dolls. I think people associate paper dolls with the past more than the present, which is a pity I suppose. Online dress up games are very popular these days, but for me, as a child, the best thing about a paper doll was getting to draw my own costumes for them. I wonder if that are of the equation is missing, both with magnetic paper dolls and with the online kind.

Who knew looking for klippdocka would make my nostalgic? As always, enjoy the paper dolls.

Påklædningsdukker… or I just found out how to say Paper Doll in Danish…

paper_doll_around_the_webI recently received a very kind email from a reader letting me know that påklædningsdukker is Danish for paper doll. This, of course, caused a flurry of Google searching to track down paper dolls I might have missed around the web since many non-English sites never get indexed if you don’t know the right language keywords. (I’d insert a rant here about imperialism, the roman alphabet, the English language, and the internet, but really… I don’t think anyone cares…)

While I was searching Karen’s Blog came up often. I’ve linked to her blog on my Links page for a while, but for those of you who haven’t visited, I recommend her site very highly. Karen’s paper dolls are beautifully drawn in black and white or color and her stuffed animals and horses are some of my favorites.

A collection of paper dolls from what looks like the Danish version of Women’s Day.

Vintage paper doll post cards from the 1950s, I think.

Princess Razibor and her son I am also thinking from the fifties. The mild nudity (and I do mean mild) is interesting for me when I think about how nervous we are in the United States about any nudity at all.

A collection of mother and baby (or Nanny and baby) paper dolls, the different styles through time are quite illustrative of artistic movements. There’s more of the collection if you click on the left side bar links.

A cute paper doll named Liv (I think?), I couldn’t find the source site.

I hope everyone enjoys the paper dolls in Danish. I certainly had fun tracking them down and learning a word in a new language.

Hey! I’m on Youtube…

So, Light Messages Publishing recently used a few of my sets to create a really neat video trailer for their book Can’t Buy Me Love by Summer Kinard who blogs at Write Like a Mother.

I confess that I haven’t read the book (its not out yet), but I’m flattered and excited to see my work used in such a fun and creative fashion. It’s hard to say no to a book about love and lucha libre.

Plus the video is really cute. Bonus points to anyone who can name the different sets used.

P.S. I am embarrassed that I had to look up both “freegan” and “yarn bombing”, clearly I am out of the loop on such things.

Twenty Paper Dolls From Around the Web…

paper_doll_around_the_webI tend to gather up links to paper dolls, so that once in a while I can post them like this. It’s both to show off the art of people I’ve never heard of before, but it’s also to embrace the intense diversity of these paper novelties. Some of these are printable and some are just photos, but all in all, I think it’s a fun listing.

1. Sophie, A Look Behind in Fashion by Susan Beebe is a wonderful page of the early 20th century.
2. Cheer-Up Hamlet Paper Doll which I find hilarious.
3. Darling girl from the 1920’s, I would guess…
4. Printable Paper Doll by ~Miragehedgehog which is pretty darn cute.
5. Sandy by *Bee-chii has a tiny walrus… I am so pleased.
6. Blythe Paper Doll by ~Imadork007 is darling and she doesn’t look much like the doll, but I like her.
7. Fairy paper doll by ~Mauau is wonderfully surreal.
8. Fuschia Fashion Plate by Elektra Q-Tion is a bad ass roller derby chick.
9. Fangirl Paper Doll by ~violatekate is sassy and on the edge of NSFW.
10. A Finnish circus cut out… the clown scares me…
12. Cute little old fashioned girl… though I don’t think she’s that 1960s looking.
13. Batman Paper-doll by ~SylvesterHansen which includes a stylish evening gown.
14. A fashion drawing gone all paper doll in yellow and black… I don’t know the artist, or anything else, but I really like it.
15. Paper Doll: Ivanby by Winter-Vodka which is probably an anime character I’ve never heard of.
16. A model of a paper horse, of course…
17. Arabian fairy tale postcard done with cats… The Victorian’s could be so wacky
18. The Howells, a rather serious looking fifties couple.
19. Janet Laura who the person posting it says is from the 1920s, but is actually by Larry Bassin, one of my favorite paper doll artists and is modern.
20. Louis Vuitton paper dolls… which are fantastic.

And that’s all for this time. Enjoy the paper doll links.

Cleopatra Paper Doll in Full-Color

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{The Original Paper Doll Set}

First of all, I owe a big thank you to K from A Time for Paper Dolls… who was kind enough to let me post my coloered version of her lovely Cleopatra paper doll.

When I was a kid, I was totally into realistic paper dolls (Tom Tierney and Peck-Garde), but now that I am older, if not wiser, I find myself drawn to the more stylized and unusual. Larry Bassin and Kwei-Lin Lum are two of my favorite modern artists.

A Few Children’s Book Illustrator’s I’m in Love With

I love children’s books. Seriously, they make me all sorts of happy. The best ones, I think, are the lavishly illustrated editions of golden age of children’s book illustration. There was this perfect storm of printing technology meeting people newly interested in lavishing attention on their children meeting really talented artists and an obsession with fairy tales.

Truly, what could be better?

I have other favorites like Ivan Bilbun who I’ve mentioned before, and Rackham who I could post way more about than I am going to here. So, this is a partial list for me.

Edmund Dulac

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People may have heard of Edmund Dulac, the French illustrator, but what most don’t know is that he did illustrations for a collection of Edgar Allen Poe in 1912. After the Great War, the popularity of lavishly illustrated books were a rarity and he fell out of fashion. The romantic nature of his illustrations belies a certain spookiness.

Virginia Sterrett


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So, Chicago-born illustrator Virginia Frances Sterrett isn’t very well known, as far as I can tell, which is a pity. She only completed three books before she died at 31 from TB in 1931. Her stuff is both whimsical and otherworldly, with just a hint of art deco. And I’m all about hints of the art deco.

Dorothy Lathrop


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Dorothy Pulis Lathrop, born in 1891 and then died in 1980. I prefer her black and white stuff to her color illustrations, but she, like a lot of my other favorites, has a whole deco influenced whimsical thing going. She’s probably most famous for illustrating Hitty and Her First Hundred Years which is one of my favorite books. Despite the some pretty dated content, the book is still wonderful, but then… I do have a thing for dolls.

Kay Nielsen


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So, Kay Nielsen was Danish. His stuff feels somehow every northern to me. He had a somewhat tragic life, but he’s best known for his work with Disney on Fantasia. In his later years, he was quite poor and after his death no museum or library wanted his materials. Fortunately, his manuscripts and other papers eventually found a home at the University of Pittsburgh.

T. Blakeley Mackenzie


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Mackenzie was born in 1887, and died in 1944. He win’s my “artist no one has heard of who I adore” award. The poor guy hasn’t even got a Wikipedia entry. It’s a pity, because his stuff is amazing. He avoids the sentimentality that was so rampant in the early 20th century and instead makes things that are fantastical and… like almost everyone else I like… also a little off center.

So, these are a few of my favorites. Does anyone have a favorite one that I missed?

The Skintone Pallette

skintones_set1So, several months ago I mentioned that I was collecting skin-tone colors. To the right is the palette I pull nearly all the skin tones I use on the blog. On top of each color block is the alpha-numeric hex code that defines each color. These tones were collected by looking at photographs of actresses and models from a variety of different ethnicity and than simplified from an original image file of over fifty different colors.

After a while, shades of peach and brown start to meld into each other until they all look the same.

Generally, I don’t think in ethnicity when I’m coloring paper dolls. I think in color. How much red is there? How much yellow? How much grey or blue? Is it a warm color or a cool color?

The human species is hundreds of colors, the differences subtle and complicated. Paper dolls on the other hand, especially those who are supposed to share shoes, need to be a smaller collection of colors. I thought someone other than me might find this set useful, so here it is. The other nice thing about this set is this: Each of the colors prints out clearly different from the others on my cheap color printer. That is an advantage which is well worth the limited palette to me.

Flock’s of the Future…

It’s all Flock stuff today in the preview department.

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I’ve been working on a set of Flock’s based on the classic “warrior, thief, wizard, cleric” thing from epic fantasy novels (also Dungeons and Dragons, but I was trying to avoid admitting that). These pieces are part of the “cleric” set which is inspired by the cliche oracle who sends hero on their missions.

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I generally don’t think a lot about children, but I wanted to work on a set of pieces that would be easy for kids to manipulate. That’s why I created these fantasy dresses in one piece rather than layering the elements like I did for the Oracle above.

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To go with my Little Red Ridinghood, this is a different set of fairytale clothing. I think the story is obvious, but I was told by others it wasn’t. Anyone care to guess?

Paper Doll Blogging: Advice and Thoughts

I recently got a very kind email from a reader named Whitney.

She asked what advice I would give to a someone starting a paper doll blog, because she was thinking about it and she wanted to know what I thought.

The truth is that I’m not an expert on blogging nor am I an expert on website design or SQL or marketing or social media (I don’t even have a facebook page) or really anything else. Problogger has a really solid listing of articles about blogging and blog starting. I’d also recommend reading up about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the pros and cons of various platforms. Doing homework before you start will make you happier later. I promise.

The thing about paper doll blogs (and really all craft/art blogs out there, I think) is that you’re making all your own content.

Making all your own content is time consuming.

So, here is my one big tip that keeps me sane…

Work as far ahead of yourself as you possibly can.

I know this seems like cheating somehow, but it is the only way I can do this and keep sane. I think it’s is better to have one or two posts a week, consistently, than to post ten and then not post for three weeks.

I like to hope my readers agree.

Next time I’ll write a little about making goals and how I keep naturally disorganized self organized.

Questions? Thoughts? Drop a comment below.

Native American Paper Dolls… Dude I can’t find any…

I don’t usually political on this blog, but today I am pretty annoyed.

I grew up surrounded by Native American culture, particularly Tlingit and Haida. When I moved to the Lower 48, I was shocked to discover that people seemed to have completely forgotten that Native American’s still existed in the world. Mainstream culture accepts depictions of Native American’s that it would never accept of Blacks or Hispanics or Asians or Jews, and it only takes a few depressing internet searches to discover this. Team mascots being the worst offenders.

And I’m pretty internet savvy. I have a freaking library degree, after all, but in my search for paper dolls to celebrate Native American Heritage Month, I have come up pretty blank.

I found these Iroquois paper dolls, both a man and a woman. The art is pretty simple, but they would be fun for a small child, I think.

Native Tech’s virtual paper doll brings back memories of coding javascript back in the day, but seriously needs to be updated with something less cranky.

The Alaska State Museum used to have a really cute one they passed out for free depicting several different groups costumes, but I didn’t see an online version of it.

So, I am putting out the call to my internet friends. Help me find attractive, non-stereotypical, free printable paper dolls of Native Americans. Ideally one’s that specify who they are depicting and don’t fall into the “generic buckskins trap”. Please? There have to be more than these.

Edit 11/15/13: I have written further on this topic in my post “Traditional Native American Clothing of the Early 21st Century” By Steven Paul Judd & Native American Paper Dolls.

Some New Things from the Sketchbook…

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I’ve been trying to do more historical stuff, but it always takes longer. Theses are for Marisole and both date from the 1860s. I might get them done for Thanksgiving, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.

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So, here is Puck, rocking some historically inaccurate 18th century gear. I love the hats. I wanted to make a Prince for all the fantasy Pixie paper dolls I have done.

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And in a total contrast to the 1860’s… Marisole in SPACE! (Yes, the exclamation point is entirely necessary.) She’s going to be a pink haired alien chick with guns and this fills me with a sort of unhealthy manic glee.

And Then There’s the Sketchbook…

Today, I did a lot of inking after work… and photographed it on an empty box left over from the move… I do seem to still have a fair number of those laying about.

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A pirate pixie set I have been working on… I listened to Treasure Island on audio book during the drive down to Alabama and well… I got inspired.

I almost gave her a peg leg, but I restrained myself.

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Heads for a few different Pixies and a steampunk-ish Pixie set, I finished inking today. Hence the photo-op on the deck… I love having a deck. It’s a new experience.

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I’ve been working on more one-shot paper dolls. I like the freedom of the new less scheduled system, because it allows me to play around with things I wouldn’t normally do. I’m not too keen on her lips though, I have to confess. I think she looks angry.