A Stylish Paper Doll July: A Strawberry Lolita Dress

A strawberry themed dress with tights and a purse. A paper doll coloring page.

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So, when I did my strawberry doll I somehow got in my head that I wanted to draw a strawberry coordinate in the Japanese street fashion of Lolita. I really love how detailed these styles can get and it was great practice for working on my linework in Procreate. I got a new tablet recently. It’s bigger (which is amazing), but it is also much more sensitive. I am having to learn how to use the stabilization features a little more.

Anyway, this was a challenge for me, but I am happy with how it came out and, as I always do with Lolita fashion, I had lots of fun coming up with ways to include strawberries. I wish I’d gone a little further with the pattern on the dress, but I am still not very confident with patterns in Procreate.

A Stylish Paper Doll July: Paper Doll Pajamas

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I don’t draw a lot of paper doll pajamas. Mostly because I think they are sort of boring. Plus, for years I didn’t own any matching sets. I thought it was still to buy matching pajamas/lounge wear. I picked up “comfy pants” here and there when on sale and tended to pair them with whatever oversized t-shirts I had around.

However, at some point, I bought a set that matched on sale at Costco, I think, and I feel in love with the simplicity of having comfortable tops and bottoms that I was embarrassed to answer the door in or walk to the postbox if I needed too. The pandemic meant I wasn’t going out much. Plus, I had some surgery that I had to recover from, so I needed clothing that was easy to wash and easy to wear.

So, my collect of comfy clothing has now expanded to be quite extensive. I still tend to pick them up from Costco on sale and I have both cold weather fuzzy versions and warm weather knit versions. A lot of them look like this set- jogger pants and a simple top.

I know some people really love paper doll pajamas, so if you’re in that camp, this one is for you.

A Stylish Paper Doll July: A Doll from 1915

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Sources:

Today’s paper doll is wearing a 1915 corset and shoes from an ad from 1913. Her corset is the “Perida” model, which seems to have been a name for several different styles sold by Perry, Dame & Co at a variety of price points. This model was advertised as a comfort model, likely because of the elastic inserts and lack of heavy boning.

Confession: I am not 100% happy with how this paper doll’s hair came out. I started with a reference image, as I do, but somehow between the penciling stage and the inking stage and the reinking stage, because I hated the first inking, the end result doesn’t look like the reference photo at all. I’m hesitant to even state what I was working from, as the resemblance is… not really there.

But I did have a source even if the outcome doesn’t look much like the source. Sometimes, that’s how it goes. I did not put it on the paper doll file, because I thought doing so suggested a higher level of fidelity to the original than exists As a librarian, I think a lot about the idea of constructed authority- if you cite a source, people then assume a higher level of accuracy than if you don’t cite a source. Since most people don’t actually check sources, this can create a false appearance of historical rigor where no such rigor exists.

Is this a high standard to hold paper dolls too?

Well, yes, but I still think it matters, especially because this image will likely be separated from this blog post by the whims of the internet and I don’t want people to get a false impression. Mrs. Ike Perkins and Mrs. Sargent Dorsey deserve better than that. Don’t you think? I think so.

A Stylish Paper Doll July: A Dress from 1915

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Sources:

Popping back to 1915 to continue with that 1910 theme which has been a part of this whole month. I did not finish these pieces in anything resembling the order I started them in (as usual for me), so while this is one of the older ones I drew, here it is on day 10.

Day 10. I am quite proud!

Anyhow, this dress is from Perry, Dame and Co catalog. Perry, Dame and Co. was a New York department store. The dress was described as a bargain, but I have no idea how one assesses a bargain dress in 1915. The price did seem lower than most of the other dresses in the catalog, since the prices range on dresses from about 7 dollars to 2 dollars. To put that in perspective, according to inflation calculator 2 dollars in 1915 is about 60 dollars today.

A better way to think about it, I think, is that in 1912 a union female postal clerk made between 66 to 100 dollars a month in 1912 in NY while a female telegraph operator made between 1.39 and 1.94 per day. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports are just fascinating, if you feel like looking through them. The one I looked at didn’t break out race, just sex, but, in general, black women would have been paid considerably less than white women and had fewer employment options.

Anyway, I assume most people don’t get joy from reading through these sorts of things and I’ll not bore you with more labor statistics from the 1910s.

A Stylish Paper Doll July: Cyberpunk, Sort of…

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Inspiration:

  • So many 1980s/1990s sci-fi movies… Escape from New York, RoboCop, Judge Dredd, The Running Man…

On Sunday mornings, I usually get together with some freinds from grad school on the internet in a private chat and we all play a game of Shadowrun, which is a table top roleplaying game set in a fantasy/cyberpunk future. The game was written in the 1980s and it always feels very 1980s to me.

So, in honor of the the fact that it is Sunday and the fact that I have a weird deep soft-place in my heart for the way the future was concieved in the 1980s, I offer up this 1980s/1990s scifi inspired paper doll.

I think the look works best when you can actually layer it- the cropped top over the jumpsuit look will always remind me of the 1980s. I don’t know why. Maybe because it feels like 1980s work out clothing.

A Stylish Paper Doll July: Another Little Summery Paper Doll with a Floral Dress

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Super pleased this with little paper doll. Originally, the floral pattern was going to go on her undies, but it was too large and looked weird. So, I put in on the dress instead.

Very happy with the dress. It was based on one I just bought for a trip, but then didn’t end up wearing. Oh well… I have a conflicted feelings about dresses. I love the idea, but never seem to wear them.

That’s kinda all I got today! Enjoy the printable paper doll coloring page!

A Stylish Paper Doll July: A Little Rainbow Weather Theme

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Like yesterday’s paper doll, today’s paper doll was inspired by some doodles I did of different “themes” for dolls. Once I started really thinking about this project as a project lasting 31 days (oh my) I thought to myself- Self, you need some dolls.

So, I came up with a few themes I liked- strawberries (originally cherries, but strawberries seemed more fun once I started drawing), rainbows and clouds, florals and geometrics. I managed to carve out some time over the weekend to get all of them done and ready, except the geometric one. That one is still in progress.

Today is weather themed and tomorrow will be flowers.

As always, I find it much easier when I batch my work. I tend to work on several things at once.

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.

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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.