gothic

Curves: Fur Trimmed Gothic

So, this is a stupidly titled paper doll, but her sleeves are fuzzy, so that should be worth something. 🙂

Curves is a complicated series for me, in part because it fore fills two goals. I began it when I did all my paper dolls for the blog in the heavily shadowed style of Curves, but I wanted to do a full figured paper doll since the ones I had seen online were not very attractive and I thought I could do better.

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Two years later, Curves is my only regularly updating paper doll in the heavily shadowed style I developed in college and still often use for non-paper doll drawing. I like the style, because I believe it doesn’t need to be colored, it has a strong enough graphic presence without adding color. A lot of people color them, and that’s fine with me, but my goal was to make a black and white paper doll that didn’t need to be colored.

There were some side effects of this. The heavy shadows, strongly influenced by Frank Miller’s graphic novels, make for a fairly “dark” paper doll. In several ways, the details are often obscured and lost while the tone is also distinctly heavy. Being a bit of a noir movie lover, I don’t mind the tonal shift, but I do think it lends its self to some styles better then others. Gothic, vintage, and some fantasy clothing comes out looking wonderful, but the average jeans and t-shirt leave something to be desired.

I don’t want to give up my heavily shadowed dolls, because I do like them. I also don’t want to stop drawing a full figured paper doll since I think its important. Unfortunately, I also getting somewhat bored with Curves after two years. I think there needs to be a Curves 2.0. I just haven’t figured out yet how to pull that off or what it’ll look like when I do.

Progress reports and thoughts on the subject will be forth coming. Until then, enjoy the furry Gothic costumes for this new Curves doll and anyone’s thoughts on the matter are welcome.

Dark & Steamy: Gothic Steampunk Printable Paper Doll

Today’s paper doll is a little gothic and a little steampunk. That’s okay right? It’s not like mixing oil and water or something.

Erin, who won my little Trivia contest from last Monday, wrote me the following description of what she wanted for her custom Marisole paper doll.

I know that I want my doll to be very pale with brown hair… As for style of clothes and what not, I know that I love Victorian and Steampunk style. Belts, buckles, zippers, lace, keys, and corsets. That kind of stuff. I have included a few links as inspiration I guess, but feel free to disregard them. I dislike the color yellow, LOVE red, black and purple, but other than that… I’m not overly picky.

I asked for a little clarification on shades of brown (she said red brown) and exactly what sort of colors for metals she liked and then set to work. Like a deadline, it was oddly liberating to be paper dolling based on someone else’s guidelines. I’ve done other steampunk sets, but this one quickly got a gothic steampunk paper doll flare- I think the color scheme is what pushed it into gothic territory for me. I’ll always think of those as a gothic colors. I do hope she’s pale enough, because outside of doing another vampire paper doll, I couldn’t imagine going paler than this color. I think it reads as “pale” rather than reading as “corpus.”

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Since one of my favorite features of Victorian dresses was the fact that women got to wear all sorts of different clothing for different activities, I decided to treat the paper doll as though she was an actual Victorian lady- all be it in an alternative steampunk universe- in need of costumes for the range of standard Victorian lady activities.

Here we go.

The Morning Dress: Morning dresses were always more casual then other costumes. Erin sent me a reference link to this beautiful costume. I loved the colors and the drape. To make it a little more Victorian feeling, I added sleeves. Though technically a morning dress would never be worn outside the house, I added a hat since the reference costume featured one. Also, I like hats.

The Walking Costume: The other set of reference images I got was for a beautiful 1880’s reproduction bustled suit and I confess the early 1880’s when skirts were tight, before the huge bustle emerged is one of my favorite times in Victorian fashion. I made the suit purple (to match the purple/red color scheme), created a totally non-period hat and added some accents in silver and brass.

The Afternoon Dress: Mostly an excuse to draw a wild leather corset (well, I imagine its in leather, I suppose technically it could be any fabric you like), the afternoon dress was inspired by the corsets of 1910. The net/lace overlay was my attempt at lace, though I have mixed feelings about how it turned out. Afternoon dresses were also often visiting costumes, so she had to have a hat.

The Ball Gown: No costume set could be complete with out a ballgown and as I love drawing corsets, no ballgown couldn’t not have a corset top. The far left costume of this fashiion plate inspired the oddly bondage-esque skirt. I got a little carried away with my lock and key motif I think, but I had fun doing it.

As regular readers know, I’m a wee bit obsessed with Victorian inspired costumes. I’ve done two other steampunk/neo-Victorian Marisole paper dolls. There was the slightly candy like one (a lesson in how colors don’t look so bright before I process the images for Web and then seem to get brighter) and a more traditional color scheme.

I will probably do another trivia contest thing next week. So, keep your eyes open for that.

Curves: Gothic Goddess

Hmmm… I just realized I misdated this paper doll… opps. I’ll fix it later. 🙂

I love how the hoop set looks under her skirt, I think they look like bones. Originally I was going to draw the costume on the left for Marisole and I spent a lot of time sketching it and re-sketching it and it never looked right. I’m glad I eventually decided to make it for Curves. I think it looks much better.

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There’s something about the heavily shadowed paper dolls that I draw that seems to lend itself to gothic styling. I think it’s the contrast. I first started drawing paper dolls in this heavy shadowed style because I liked the idea of paper dolls in black and white which didn’t need to be colored. I wanted them to stand alone as graphic works without needing the injection of color. I think sometimes they work well and sometimes they don’t.

Also, if I’d done this set for Marisole, it would have been another mostly black set of clothing for her and sometimes I just get sick of that. So, I’m glad Curves got it in the end for a couple of reasons.

Pixie: Belladonna

A gothic fairy paper doll with a 12 piece wardrobe from paperthinpersonas.com.

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Last year, one of my most common search terms was “Gothic Fairies” and I felt rather bad about this since I didn’t have any on the site. So, at least now there is a slightly gothic fairy paper doll available for anyone whose looking for a gothic fairy paper doll. Actually, I wasn’t totally sure what a Gothic fairy paper doll was, but my research (google image search) suggests layers of torn garments and pale skin seem to be requirements of the gothic fairy look. I rather think she needs wings, but I don’t know how to add them, so that might be a later addition to the set.

The paper doll is rather a companion to Flora (not to be confused with my wooden doll named Flora. Apparently, I like the name Flora…), who is my other fairy paper doll. I don’t usually draw fairies, but they were fun.

And there’s a poll.

Undead Beauty: Vampire Paper Doll to Print

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It’s Marisole as a vampire for Halloween. That’s really all I got here. I also drew a set of costumes for her I should have posted last week, but didn’t. So… I think it’ll go up next Monday.

She does have fangs. You can’t really see them in the smaller version, but they are obvious in the larger PNG file of the paper doll.

There’s also a poll in the sidebar, if you feel like voting and haven’t already.

Sugar and Spice Version 2.0: A Gothic Lolita Paper Doll

So, yesterday, I had a Sweet Lolita paper doll and today we have a Gothic Lolita version of the same doll. Once again, you’ll want to slit along the dotted line on her hair, so she can wear the bows and hat and other hair accessories. Hair accessories seem to be very important in the whole Lolita thing. I openly confess to not being an expert, but I did my best. You can check out the Sweet Lolita paper doll for the list of sources I used.

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While I was researching Lolita fashion, I did find this cute paper doll by Ninipowwaa on Deviant Art. She also has her own blog which I can’t read, cause I think it’s in French. In high school, when most people I knew were failing to learn French, I was busy failing to learn Spanish. I love how she colored the paper doll. Someday, I might actually try to shade Marisole. I mean… not in the near future, but it could happen.

And, I should say, doing two different color schemes was really actually difficult. Don’t expect it to become a theme, but by the time I realized how long it was taking me to recolor the whole set, I’d already gotten so far along that I wasn’t stopping. I don’t think I’ll be doing Lolita fashion again in the future for the paper dolls unless I get lots of requests and start to feel guilty. I have a very well developed sense of guilt.

Curves: Evil Sorceress

As some of you have no doubt already figured out, I draw ahead of time as much as I can. It’s easier to work in spurts when I have a few hours to devote to the blog rather then doing fifteen minutes here and twenty minutes there. So on Saturday, after I had run my errands and washed my laundry, I settled down in front of some old Star Trek episodes on DVD and drew paper doll clothes for a few hours.

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For next Monday’s Marisole I had my fashion magazines out and windows from clothing websites up on my computer screen. To draw for Florence, I pulled out books of Victorian fashion plates and printouts of doll furniture. But when it came time to draw for Curves, all I had to do was find my thumbnail doodles and put then down next to my notebook. It was entirely liberating not to be bogged down with references.

Of course, it wasn’t as though I didn’t have some limits. The thing about Evil Sorceresses is that it’s a slippery slope and once you are one, you can’t wear just anything. Sure, some might say it’s a bit cliche or even over done, but the Sorceress has to maintain her reputation. And most Sorceresses don’t start bad, they just sort of slide that way. Something about being beautiful and powerful seems to just go to their heads. And once they are an accepted memeber of the Evil Soceress Guild, they can’t wear just anything.

What would people say, after all, if you showed up to a gathering wearing flannel or flowers? Well, flowers are okay if they’re evil flowers. Not, you know, daisies or something.