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.