Mermaid Monday #4: Bride Mermaid in Red Tattered Wedding Dress with Iridescent Blue and Purple Tail

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

My poll was a success! Thanks, everyone who voted. While black had a strong showing near the end, iridescent won the day, rather to my chagrin as I haven’t really drawn anything iridescent before… I think it worked out reasonably well, though not perfectly. I based the iridescent part on one of the pearls in this picture.

Mermaids associate the colors pink and red most strongly with weddings and brides, possibly due to red seaweed being a traditional bridal decoration. Pink has a rather old-fashioned feel and deep reds display the family’s wealth, because the deeper the color is, the harder it is to waterproof successfully, and so dark or rich colors weren’t available until more recently and they’re more expensive. These days, mermaid brides tend to choose a shade between pale pink and blood red that they think best suits their tail. (This means that mermaid bridesmaids grumble more than human ones if the bride insists on their wearing the same color; the green-tailed mermaid does not like the poppy red that sets off the bride’s black tail so well, and the mermaid with the light yellow tail feels washed out in the pale pink favored by the silver-tailed bride.) Pearls are also traditional wedding decorations, and a moderately priced rope of white pearls serves much the same function at a mermaid wedding as a toaster does at a wedding for American humans. Different-colored pearls, particularly black and rose ones, are most valued. Red seaweed is, of course, very popular, although seaweed of every type might be used much as humans might use flowers. Depending on where a mermaid lives and on the fashions, other flowers are popular; water lilies are often used in some areas, and tropical flowers such as hibiscus might be more popular in others. Not all mermaid wedding dresses are tattered, but it’s as hard for mermaid designers to resist as lace is for human ones, because of the strong romantic overtones.

For the veil, you will want to cut a straight line between the bottom of the crown, underneath the seaweed, and the veil. This way the doll’s head can be poked through.

New poll for this week:


1940s wedding dress (because I’m bitter about Liz Patterson)

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

So, I follow For Better or for Worse, even though my husband says “If you don’t like it, why do you read it?” And I don’t know why. I don’t like Anthony. I don’t really like Liz all that much anymore. And when, in a piece of hamfisted foreshadowing, Dee found a boxed 1940s wedding dress found behind a rock in a crawlspace, I didn’t really like that either, especially because it was obvious it would clean up as good as new and that it would fit Liz perfectly. But what the heck, I can suspend emotion and reason to appreciate a good dress, and even if I, like srah, would just as soon see Liz run off at the altar, I can deal with seeing her married there if she is wearing a half-decent gown. And then we saw what that moldy old dress looked like.

I don’t like it. Just look at it, no way it’s a 1940s dress, not with the combination of the neckline and the transparent sleeves. That looks like 1970s to me. See, look at this 1975 pattern illustration. That middle dress looks just like it, with shorter sleeves. (And frankly, if her bridesmaids wore those middle dresses, that would redeem the WHOLE strip for me.) I don’t think it’s really flattering on her, either, I don’t like those sleeves or that huge bustle.

And as I was looking at 1940s and 1970s wedding dresses, I got even more disappointed that hers wasn’t a 1940s dress, and how much fun that would have been to draw, and so I thought, well, I’ll draw one anyways! I based it off of this pattern (and the crown off of this one) and actually, I chose it because I think it would have looked good on Liz — I think the neckline would have suited the way she wears her hair when it’s down, and I think its relative plainness and sleekness suit her better than the heavily beaded and gauzy dress she got. I don’t think she seems to be a very frou-frouy kind of person: she dresses pretty plainly, usually, and doesn’t seem to have a high-maintenance style, so I think that this design works as long as she has her hair down, to offset the straight lines of the dress. I actually did a sketch of her in this dress. I think it works on her pretty well, although if she was actually going out and buying a dress, it probably wouldn’t be this one. But then again, it wouldn’t be the one she got either.

And actually, some of those 1970s dresses are completely awesome, in a half-ironic half-awestruck way. I mean, even if they look dated and a little goofy, I still love the romantic style and ruffles more than I like everything being strapless and sleek these days. Just try and tell me this gal’s wedding wouldn’t have been an absolute delight.. And I rather like this one far on the right, with modified sleeves… and I totally feel like I shouldn’t love the middle one here but I do. I guess I could get behind Liz’s dress if it was her mom’s dress, but 1940s, yeah right.