Black And White 1930s Evening Gown with Peplum

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For today’s black and white gown, I decided on a 1930s evening gown. For one thing, a simple dress sounded appealing at 9 PM when I started; for another thing, we love our 1930s fashion around these parts, if the response to the white and pink gown is any indication.

Next week, I am going to tackle drawing the winners of my music contest; hopefully I can finish them off in one week. I’ll be skipping Mermaid Monday, but it’ll be back the week after that. (Maybe the Supremes will get a mermaid dress? We’ll see.)

Black and White Medieval Gown with Flower Garlands

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

I wanted to play with long sleeves a little more, so that’s where this dress came from. You would have to cut the edge of the sleeve for the hand to fit, but I have confidence my readers or their adult paperdoll providers can figure it out.

I said there was a special contest coming up, and here it is! I use last.fm, a site that provides music recommendations, Internet radio and so on, mostly because I always listen to the radio while I’m working, but also partially because I’m a sucker for little graphs based on what I listen to. I was thinking it would be fun to do some paperdolls based on the music I like listening to, but there’s so much I couldn’t decide what to try.

That’s where you come in! To enter, take a look through my last.fm profile, choose any artist I’ve ever listened to, and post it as a comment. On the 28th, I’ll use a random number generator to pick five comments, and then draw something based in some way on those artists. For example, if one of the winners picked Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, I listen to the Scheherazade suite all the time, so perhaps I’d do something based off of the Arabian Nights, something from the ballet, or maybe something from 1888 when it was composed.

Here’s the rules:
1) Even if you’ve won one of my black-and-white contests, you can enter this one.
2) You can only make one guess, and it has to be on this post.
3) Entries will be accepted until 9 PM EST, June 28th.
4) Yes, Brian, even you can enter.
5) I’ll take suggestions, but I reserve the right to make the final decision on what exactly to draw.

Mermaid Monday #19: Black And White Mermaid

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I don’t know about you, but I am tremendously sick of wedding dresses. That’s one of the two problems I have when I do theme weeks: first, I get sick of the subject, second, I feel like I want to make every day better than the one before. It’s not necessarily a good combination. I do feel, though, like I’ve got the desire to play around with the white gel pen out of my system, though. I haven’t even been able to bring myself to finish the veil from Friday’s, and I missed a day for the first time since I started again, because I wasn’t feeling well Saturday. Well, this week, there will be color! Lots of color! But for today, a replacement black-and-white mermaid outfit. So let us say instead, there will be color! lots of color! tomorrow! Or color this and post it yourself, and you can provide me with color for a day.

It does occur to me that this style of top works rather poorly on this doll shape if you actually cut it out… I’m sorry, I don’t have time to try to fix it tonight. I’ll think about it a little more, though.

One benefit of the theme weeks is that I do enjoy putting up the polls afterward…

Black and White Regency Gown with Flower Lace

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

This is my second black and white regency gown, I know, but I only had an hour between activities to get something drawn and scanned. Regency gowns are so cute, fun to design, easy to draw and popular that they’re like the potato chips of the paperdoll universe. I could do a whole blog of just regency gowns, and it would likely be more popular in certain quarters than my current hodgepodge of video game dresses, random bits of pop culture and mermaids. Oh well, if my aim was only to become popular, I suppose it’s more likely I’d do nothing but dresses inspired by Twilight and Taylor Swift, as the wedding dress and the Love Story dress are currently the two most popular ones I’ve drawn. But that would be quite a different blog, and I would have to be a rather different person, I suppose.

Anyways! I think next week I may very well focus on wedding dresses. I’ll be starting off with a red mermaid wedding gown (which barely won in the poll, with 52% of the vote at the moment — don’t worry, the week after I will return to the sea), so the timing is good. If you have any suggestions for favorite time periods, really interesting wedding dresses for me to look at and so on, feel free to post them in the comments. This poll may or may not influence what I wind up drawing; mostly it’s just because I’m curious.

Black And White Short-Sleeved Princess Gown with Wave Patterns

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I wanted to draw a princess-ish dress today, but it’s too hot and even drawing loads of fabric seems unappealing. (OK, so even with short sleeves, even if you imagine the fabric to be fairly light this is still quite a lot of imaginary fabric, but Ivy doesn’t have the same concerns in her life that I do, so it’s all right.) This one seems a little boring to me, but colored (maybe in light, cool colors) with a little pattern here and there, I bet it’d be really cute.

Brian and I saw The Secret of Kells today, a fantastic animated movie about The Book of Kells. The art style is absolutely gorgeous and intricate, and the story was charming as well. The waves here are kind of influenced by it, come to think of it, although I didn’t really realize until Brian pointed it out!

Time for a new contest! Winner gets to pick any one of my black-and-white dresses and tell me how they want it to be colored. The last one got a mite tedious, so this one will run from now until 9:00 PM EST, June 2nd.

How many visits did my site get between (and including) April 1, 2010 and April 30, 2010?

Don’t forget the rules…
1) If you’ve already won this year, please don’t enter.
2) One guess per person per post.
3) If no one gets the exact number by 9:00 PM EST, June 2nd, I’ll pick the closest guess.
4) I’ll give one hint each day the contest goes on.

Edit: It’s Sunday, and I’m not posting a paperdoll today but I am posting a hint! It’s between 10,000 and 30,000.

For my poll, it looks like summer has pulled ahead slightly…

Black and White Ruqun

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Despite the fact that I think they’re gorgeous, I know hardly anything about traditional Chinese clothes, so I was glad when I was finally able to put a name to this kind of outfit — a ruqun! I’ve seen it before many times, but never knew what it was called. I don’t think I got the sleeves quite right, but it is a first attempt…

No one has the answer to my question yet. I guess the good part is, the eventual winner now has one more black and white outfit to choose from…

Question: How many Prismacolor pencils do I own as of 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.

Just to restate the rules:
1) It’s a new year, so even if you’ve already won one, feel free to guess again.
2) One guess per person per post.
3) If no one gets the exact number by noon EST, May 25th, I’ll pick the closest guess.

Also, I’m putting up a new poll, just to satisfy my own curiosity…

Black and White Gown with Layered Ruffles

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Yeah… I’ve been spending a little too much time looking at Japanese “color dresses” (カラードレス), dresses that a Japanese bride might wear for part of the reception. Still, this was just playing around with drawing ruffles, for the most part. I wouldn’t class this as my attempt to draw a color dress, because it’s just too darn sober and restrained. Don’t believe me? Let’s do a google image search for カラードレス…　In any case, I had this conversation with my husband after finishing it:

“I dunno if I like it. It looks like one of those princess skirt cakes.”

“They’re gonna eat it up. You’re just pandering directly to your core audience with this. I think it’s completely craven. You know? … You’re not quoting me are you?”

Forgive my craven nature, paperdoll fans… Anyways, I think this would look nice colored, maybe all in shades of some nice warm color, but I started it too late to give it a shot. Hope someone else does, though! Or maybe I will soon, or maybe I’ll do another contest. I still have to color the masquerade dress from the last contest, though.

And would you look at that… I made it through a whole week. I’m posting this one a little late, admittedly, but it’s 10:45, and that’s well before midnight. Having Sunday as my day to sketch and think about the next week worked pretty well, so I’m going to keep doing that. See you on Mermaid Monday!

Black and White Regency Gown for Coloring

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So I think that Saturdays will be black-and-white days, and Sundays I won’t post anything, but will try to sketch out the week to come. We’ll see how that goes… Anyways, for today just a plain Regency gown for people to color. Maybe for me to color at some point, too, but we won’t get ambitious just yet.

Belated Black and White Valentine's Day Gown

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Unsurprisingly, I’m late for Valentine’s Day, but I had to do a Valentine’s Day gown for two reasons. One, Valentine’s Day is the perfect occasion for the type of ridiculousness I do best. Although I appreciate the simplicity of the re-branded Valentine’s Day, I’m having none of it. (Pass the lace.) Two, I love all of you for not forgetting me like I so richly deserve. I’m sorry.

The truth is, for the last few months I’ve been devoting myself to my other great interest, which is studying Japanese, and for some reason, when I’m really devoting myself to one thing, my interest in everything else is non-existent, and I am lucky if I can start work on time and make dinner in a consistent fashion. I really miss drawing, though. I’m going to take a stab at doing both. As a matter of fact, I was thinking, if I could combine my Japanese studies and my paperdolls somehow, I would never get tired of either of them! I’m seriously open to suggestions on this point. If you were me, what would you do with these two incongruous, underdeveloped skills?

In the meantime… well, we’ll see. I really miss paperdolling. But even if you don’t see me again for another month (and I really will try not to be that flaky this time!) at least now you have a new dress to color. This one could keep you busy for a while, too…

Halloween LOTR Costume Series #2: Black and White Elf Gown with Circlet and Embroidered Edging

Click for larger version (black and white elf dress) (PNG), click for larger version (blue and gold ball gown) (PNG); click for PDF version (black and white elf dress), click for PDF version (blue and gold ball gown).Click here for the list of dolls.

Today’s costume is intended to be a dress for an elf, just something to lounge around and do elfish things in, whatever elves do with their time. (Nope, I haven’t yet started reading the trilogy again, can you tell?) I’m not quite sure how I like this one, but I think with the right coloring it could be really pretty… Well, hopefully whoever guesses this round’s quiz answer has good taste!

I really like Arwen’s dresses, but it seems like my three favorites – the red and blue one, the blue-grey one and the green coronation gown – are so close in construction to each other that if I did a similar style it would feel so much like I was just plain ripping it off. Yeah, the style is pretty enough, and basic enough, that maybe I will rip it off just a little anyways… just once…

As for the 1885 ball gown, Catie asked me to color it in light and dark blue, gold and red for the flowers… I like the way it turned out, I hope you like it Catie! For this week… sorry, I’m not feeling too creative…
What’s my favorite warm Prismacolor?
“Warm” being defined here as red, orange, yellow or pink… so there’s a big clue already, right? Please post your guess in the comments, first to guess it can tell me how to color today’s gown!

The poll for next week’s theme is still open, please vote if you haven’t yet!