White Natasha Liana Gown from Holy Clothing’s Design Contest with Flower Garlands

Click for larger version (PNG); click for PDF version. Click here for the list of dolls.

So last year I entered a contest run by my favorite clothing store, Holy Clothing. Rather than “favorite” it is probably more accurate to say that they are the only clothing store I have any regard for whatsoever! This might be a surprise, but I actually hate shopping for clothes: I just find it tedious and frustrating, I don’t like hardly any of what I find in stores, I’d rather spend money on other things and I don’t care for fashion in the least. Since I found Holy Clothing, one of their skirts paired with a plain white shirt has pretty much been my uniform.

They held a design contest late last year, promising to make the winner’s drawing into a real dress: I sent in three potential designs and one of them was chosen as one of four that were then voted on by the company’s Facebook fans. (I can’t find the link to the voting anymore, which is a shame, as all the sketches were very lovely.) I got $100 in store credit for winning, and the dress was supposed to be called the Liana Dress. It took longer than they expected to translate the sketch into a dress, though, and then they wanted to release it in the right season, so it just went on sale this month.

Here’s the original sketch, as well. This wasn’t my favorite of my three designs, and actually it’s not one I’d generally rush to buy myself because I wear my Holy Clothing stuff every day, so I don’t really have much interest in the garments that seem too costume-like or impractical. The reason I designed it is that a fair amount of people use Holy Clothing dresses as wedding dresses, and so I was thinking, what would my ideal Holy Clothing-style wedding gown look like? For this reason, I hope that the next run of the dresses comes in white as well, but in the meantime I drew my own white version for today, with two garlands to choose from. (I don’t own it yet, though, so I don’t know the details of the finished product; please don’t take my drawing as representative of the real thing.)

Unfortunately, by the time the dress came out (almost a year after the contest ended), it seems that some wires had gotten crossed and they neglected to name it after the winner, calling it Natasha instead. I had really been more excited about that than the $100 store credit, so I was disappointed and wrote about it, asking for the name to be changed; after Christmas, they did change the name to the Liana Dress! (Thank you to everyone who agreed it should be changed – I don’t know if it affected the decision, but personally I appreciated it!)

Well, in any case, if you want to wear something I designed, this may be as close as you’ll ever get! Check Holy Clothing out, as well as their very active Facebook fan page.

New color chart!

I’m afraid I don’t have a pretty new dress for you all today — I’ve been working on this color chart, because I can’t find the original one. I’m sure it’s with my sketchbook that I was using before the move. What’s more, I’m sure I put both of them together somewhere odd and thought to myself, “I’ll be sure to remember where I put these, so I can find them immediately once we get there!” You’d think I’d know myself a little better after all these years… Still, this one is rather an improvement: Seashell Pink is in the right place, other people can read it — my handwriting still reflects early struggles with holding pencils, I’m afraid — and I blended out the edges so I can see what the colors look like both at their strongest and when they’ve been gone over with the colorless blender. (For some of them, like Spring Green and Copenhagen Blue, it makes a drastic difference.)

In other paperdoll news, I’ve added a couple of new paperdoll blogs to the blogroll: Vee’s Paper Dolls and Cutout Couture. I have a nagging feeling that someone posted a link to another new paperdoll blog while I was gone the last few months and I missed it. So if there are any other paperdoll blogs that I don’t have on my blogroll, please point me to them!

I’m going to put up another quick contest — I want to get back to drawing next week, so this week will be something of a coloring warmup. (Haven’t forgotten about you, Hannah: I’ll probably do that one tomorrow.) Here it is: How many visits did I have on September 12th, 2010?
Rules as always:
1) If you’ve already won this year, please don’t enter. (Music contest winners are OK to enter a black-and-white coloring contest though. Oh, and I haven’t forgotten about you guys either. As my penance, I’ve just been suffering crushing guilt whenever I listen to Lady Gaga. I hope to do those outfits before the end of the month.)
2) One guess per person per day.
3) If no one gets the exact color by noon PST, September 14th, I’ll pick the closest guess.

The number includes both this site and my paperdoll blog from 2004. (That link is worth a look if you haven’t noticed it already — nowhere else on the Internet will you find a genuine Star Captain Uniform, a celebration of World UFO Day and a wood duck fairy.) Since it’s such a short contest, I’ll give you a hint: the number is above 500 and below 5,000. The winner gets to pick out a black and white dress and tell me how they’d like it colored!

Update: The answer was 1,040; Diane came closest before the deadline.

Blue Halter Dress with Yellow and Pink Flower Pattern

Click for larger version of blue dress (PNG); click for PDF version of blue dress. Click for larger version of black dress (PNG); click for PDF version of black dress. Click here for the list of dolls.

Someone got a new tooooy ♪
I ordered some white gel pens, because I wanted to see if I could do, well, something like this. After playing with them all day, I can happily recommend the Sakura Souffle for use on top of Prismacolors. I will do a tutorial about it at some point, and a comparison of the types of pen I bought as well. But for now, I’m just happy I could do what I wanted to do with white ink! Or rather, I’m on the way to making some cool things, I think.

So this is just me playing around with my toy, I hope you like it. And since I am in such a cheery, experimental mood I couldn’t help fussing around in Photoshop and making a bonus version, too, which is a little less refreshing and springy, a little more chic.

Contest Conclusion!

As of May 18, I owned 403 Prismacolor pencils.

That means that Ophelia’s guess of 400 from the very first day was the closest one. Congratulations Ophelia — pick out a black and white dress (any of them, not just the most recent) and tell me how you want me to color it!

Thanks to everyone else for guessing! I’m sorry I made it go on so long, though…

Brian made this chart of what the votes looked like. Thanks dear!

Colored Masquerade Dress in Cool Colors

Click for larger version (PNG); click for PDF version. Click here for the list of dolls.

So this gown, the neglected black-and-white cousin of my beloved cursed sister series, may have turned out a little crazy, but all the same I like it rather better now. Amelia won my last contest by guessing that I learned my gold technique from observing one of the Spice Girls’ dresses (yes, really — there were extenuating circumstances). She got to pick how I colored it, and wrote: “I feel it ought to be mermaid themed really, on the other hand I’d love to see a peacock themed dress but this one’s too flowery…
How about you fish out the aquamarine and do a toned down peacock colours dress with deep green accents like african-violet leaves?”

I think I kind of failed on the “toned down” part of the requirement… Well, but it was fun for me anyways, and hopefully you like it somewhat, Amelia! I’m sorry you had to wait so long, though…

Time for a new contest. Guess the answer to this question, and pick your favorite of ANY of my black and white outfits and tell me how you want it colored, and I’ll do my best to follow your orders. (I think that’s more interesting than forcing the winner to stick to the last one I drew, don’t you?) New rules:
1) It’s a new year, so even if you’ve already won one, feel free to guess again. (This includes you, Amelia, because technically you won last year… ^^;;)
2) One guess per person per post. (So if no one gets it today, try again tomorrow!)
3) If no one gets the exact number by noon EST, May 25th, I’ll pick the closest guess.

Question: How many Prismacolor pencils do I own as of today, May 18th?
This includes the ones that I use, all the stubby little pencils that are too short for my current sharpener but I just can’t toss, all the ones I have in reserve and my set of Verithin pencils I hardly ever use.

Keep in mind my local scrapbooking store went out of business recently, and I hit first the 50% off sale, then the 75% off sale, to stock up on Prismacolors. So that “reserve” number is a little high. That’s the only clue you get, though!

Help me search for art theft!

So I wrote earlier about how some instances of people stealing my art had made me feel unmotivated and unhappy, which contributed to my long absence. Most of those incidents are settled now, but there’s one site that so far hasn’t replied to my message about (I hate to drive traffic to them, but oh well) this Flash dress-up game which has uncredited, modified versions of four of my dresses. (Technically, one of them is ripped straight from Freyja’s colored version of a black-and-white dress I drew.) To my surprise, the very next one I clicked on also had uncredited and modified versions of seven of my dresses. (By “modified” I mean “given several sharp thwacks with the ugly stick.” Yes, if there’s one thing Holly’s pink and white gown needed, it was certainly big brown flowers.) It was even titled Original Princess Gowns, as if the creator had hoped to make it as grating as humanly possible.

I’ve looked through that site and the sites that both Flash games are from to see if any more of my art has been ripped off. So far I haven’t found anything but those two, but there are certainly an awful lot of those games. So, if you see anything like that, on that site or others, I would appreciate if you would use this form to tell me about it. (You could e-mail me, but it should be easier to keep track of things this way.)

Anyways, it’s kind of a shame, I like dress-up games like that and I’d like to be able to make them someday…

Update: The first one, Sweet Proposal, was removed from dressupgirl.net. I sent the e-mail about that yesterday, and the one about the “Original Princesses” one today, so we’ll see if they get around to that one too…

Meet Ivy, the first in my new paper doll series!

Click for larger version with gown (PNG); click for PDF version with gown. Click for larger version without gown (PNG); click for PDF version without gown.

Welcome Ivy to the paperdoll blog family! I’ll miss working with Sylvia and Iris, but they aren’t going anywhere, so you can always go back and look at them and their clothes. With the new scanner, I really needed a change, and I was getting enough requests for new dolls that I wanted to do something about it…

I have big plans for this model of paper doll. The base doll is actually bald and faceless – that means I can draw hair and faces separately and add them on with Photoshop, making it easier to have different options. I’m also drawing the doll itself differently this time. If you look at Iris, she was traced off of Sylvia, and that meant that it was easier to introduce mistakes – the paper shifted, it was difficult to see, and I drew some lines differently – so parts like the arms and legs are different. If I did a third doll from the same shape, she would be different from both Iris and Sylvia in some annoying way and it would be harder to fit even more dresses. This time, I have a very faint outline of the body, and the doll is colored right on top of that, meaning that there should be less variation between dolls. So the upshot: it should be easier to make different skin tones, hairstyles / colors and faces. I wonder if you can see where I hope to go with this someday? Well, there’s a lot of work to go between here and there…

The other big change is that I’m going to start offering PDF files of each drawing. For those of you who just like to look at the pretty pictures online, it won’t make much of a difference, but for those of you who actually print things out, using the PDF file instead of the PNG will guarantee that you’ll always have the right size, and the quality should be better as well. (It also means you can zoom in really close and look at all the flaws, but trust me: print it out and it’ll look smashing.)

I like her a lot, and I hope you all do too. I look forwards to making her many lovely outfits!

Site news!

Hello everyone who still reads this poor neglected blog! I’m alive, and I’m sorry I haven’t posted anything for so long. I will get back to posting more drawings soon, though.

The big news as far as this site is concerned is that I got a new scanner! Take a look at the old version of the purple empire waist prom dress, and compare it to this lovely new version of the purple empire waist prom dress. See any differences? The coloring, while not perfect, is much closer to the original, with more of the pinkish-lavender showing up, and the big thing: NO MORE BANDING! Hooray, hooray! It was the most depressing thing to make a beautiful dress and have all those ugly bands crossing it. I mean, look at this poor dress. And this sad dress got so mangled that I tried fixing it in Photoshop – you can’t even tell I did anything, can you? That’s why so many of my dresses towards the end were wedding dresses: light-colored things were the only ones that would come out right! The valley between how lovely they appear to me and how they show up to all of you was so vast, it just made me sad. But now there’s none of that.

My plan is to rescan the dresses I liked the best that were banded the worst. (Although I will keep the old scans up: surely someone out there is crying “I like the colors on the old prom dress better and I don’t care about the banding!” and there’s no reason not to please them too…) But I’ll also start scanning new things. Help me out with this one, paperdoll fans…

If you want to know what on earth in my life is so great and interesting that I don’t draw enough paperdolls, please feel free to check out my new blog, lianaleslie.wordpress.com. Honestly, it isn’t as enthralling as all that – it’s just a place for me to put ramblings that are quite out of place on a paperdoll blog.

Thank you for your patience, paperdoll fans, and thanks to everyone who left encouraging comments while I was AWOL!

Black and White Princess Gown for Coloring

Click for larger version; click for the list of dolls.

Posted without a lot of comment, as I’ve got to get out of the house, like, ten minutes ago — I’m pretty sure it was Fibro Witch who suggested something to color, so here’s a fussy, generic princess sort of gown with, hopefully, lots of scope for coloring imagination. If you color a version of it, send it to me and I’ll post it! I’ll color a version, too.

Recession Themed Robe à la Anglais in White and Green with Pouf à la Bailout

Click for larger version; click for the list of dolls.

So, my husband and I live in Michigan, more specifically in Ann Arbor, one of the cities surrounding Detroit. On the good side, it’s almost spring and there’s nothing like the University of Michigan campus when everything is blooming and the students come out of hiding to play Frisbee by the Diag. On the bad side, the unemployment rate is 11% and our poor state is national shorthand for a grim future. Now, if I was a more diligent, self-promoting kind of artist, instead of the flighty, self-doubting, unambitious dabbler that I am, I would be taking advantage of the sad state of American finances, pitching books, putting out press releases, writing up guest posts for other blogs and who knows what else. Why’s this? Because paper dolls are the perfect toy for the modern recession.

Think of it: Iris and Sylvia can wear anything I draw, so it’s not like a regular old book with a limited number of outfits, and you can print this crazy gown for just as much money as it takes to print this subtle shift. Barbie can’t seamlessly transform into a mermaid or a ninja near as well as my girls do, and I doubt her people would let her dress up in anything too creepy. And you know what else? No Barbie doll, no other paper doll out there, no one in the world period, has a terrifying cross between one of Marie Antoinette’s court gowns and the symbols of American financial catastrophe. Yes, this may be a slightly strange toy, but that’s OK: for those that don’t yet see the tumbling Dow in the skirt, print out this pretty princess instead. We who see the humor of the pink slip petticoat and pouf à la bailout will play princesses of a more desperate time and space. Pass the cake.

Yes, I’m reading Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore To The Revolution and loving it. (thanks RLC for the recommendation!) See, I’ve always thought of 1800s fashions as beautiful and elegant (and OK, maybe at worst endearingly funny-looking) but I never could get into 1700s fashions, with the goofy hair and panniers and all. But this bias is probably because so many classic books I’ve read are set in the 1800s: the Austen books, of course, but also Vanity Fair, Little Women, Sherlock Holmes, the Anne series, Gone With The Wind, Edith Wharton novels, Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina — anyways, I can go on and on, but the point is that reading / watching movies based on / paperdolling these books gave me a vague idea of the 1800s in European / American women’s costume. However, I don’t have a similar basis for the 18th century. The only ones I can think of offhand are the Three Musketeers, A Tale of Two Cities and the Scarlet Pimpernel series, and Evelina which I just finished. Somehow, looking at all the robes a la polonaise for Evelina flipped a switch somewhere, and now I’m intrigued by that same goofy hair and panniers. I’d like to get more into fiction from the 1700s or set in the 1700s. Can anyone recommend anything for me? I’d love to have some 18th century audiobooks from Librivox, but I’ll also go the old fashioned way.

The hairpiece will sort of fit both dolls, but there’s one part of Iris’ hair that you would have to bend back. My next series of dolls will be bald.