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This gown is the product of my last contest, in which my readers first chose for me to draw an elf dress, then the contest winner Lorie Harding wrote:
Here is how I would like the dress colored. I picture the sleeves sheer and the dress done in soft pastel colors. My favorites would be peach and aqua. A delicate pattern of your choice would run through the dress. Thanks!
I like doing these contests just for their own sake, but also because I think that it’s easy for me to stick to what I’m good at, and other people’s suggestions help me improve. For example, I don’t think I really do a lot of dresses with this kind of light coloring, and I struggled to get the shading looking right. I still think I could have done better, but Friday is already upon me, and anyways I am pretty happy with this one overall!
Let’s get started with the next reader’s choice contest…
Next week will be a princess gown and some thoughts on princess culture. Don’t forget that you can now download combined color and black and white PDFs of all of my 2014 dolls and outfits for free! Also follow me on Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest for sneak previews, paperdoll thoughts and pretty illustrations. If you enjoy my work, I’d also appreciate your support through Patreon.
Even as that gown was loading the first thing out of my mouth was ‘Oh my goodness that is beautiful!’ What an enchanting gown!
Oddly, I felt awfully critical of it while I was working on it, and I adjusted the colors and pattern endlessly and redid shading… Now it’s finished and posted, I love it ;) I’m glad you like it too!
I can vouch for the fact that Liana did a lot of rework to get the shading just right… I really like the result as well. It’s very subtle.
<3
So pretty! The soft colors look appropriately ‘magical’! :-)
Thank you! :)
Beautiful dress! What I like most is the trim along the bottom. There’s not a lot, but just a little sets off the dress perfectly without making it garish. I love it.
Thank you! I was really happy with how that came out too :)
More Beautiful than I imagined. Wonderful. Thanks Liana.
Thank you! That makes me so happy :) Thanks for the coloring suggestion!
Very pretty. I’ve really been enjoying coming to your blog every Friday and getting to see another wonderful dress.
Thank you :) I really appreciate that!
Liana,
This is really beautiful. I can imagine myself wearing this dress if I were a queen. I like the swirly design in the fabric. Have you ever thought of being a fabric designer and making custom made fabric? I have a dress that is made of custom designed fabric. I love it.
Joyce
Hey, if you ever become a queen, let me know and I’ll design some dresses ;) I’ve looked into Spoonflower, which I know is really popular for fabric designers, but I’ve never really done anything with it… That might be something to look into more.
Liana, I love all your fashions and this one is exquisite! Your hard work paid off! As a long time paper doll collector – your work is among the best I’ve seen. I appreciate that each of your designs can be worn on the same dolls! So awesome and unusual!
Thank you very much! :) That they can all be worn on the same doll is honestly mostly because I’m not all that good at drawing people — I can do one decent one every couple of years! But I also really like the idea of one series of dolls having all of these great outfits, too.
I love it!!!!! If I was a fashion model and I had to choose my outfit it would be this one!