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Ginger Rogers’ White Dress from Never Gonna Dance from Swing Time, take two

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

So I drew a white dress Ginger Rogers wears at the end of Swing Time some time ago, and I never liked how it came out — I drew it a couple of days after watching the movie without much reference, it wasn’t well done to start with and my scanner washed it out. So it’s one of the dresses I always told myself I’d redraw, and then it got to be the number one image on a Google image search for “ginger rogers swing time” and in the second row for “swing time” and people started e-mailing me about how to reproduce it. How embarrassing! The skirt on the old dress didn’t look like it could hardly move, and it was so pale it was like not even a dress at all. Some nights, if the dress takes more than an hour it just isn’t happening, and this must have been one of those nights… Finally, I redrew it tonight, using this video of Never Gonna Dance. You can still see the old drawing, and I’ve got a link to it at the other blog post too, but I like this one much better. Thanks to a reader recommendation I’ve got another Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire movie waiting for me to watch it, Follow the Fleet, so I’m looking forwards to that!

Magic Wiki Dress #1: Purple Gown with Black Tulle Skirt and White Shift

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Wikipedia was never as fun as my Magic Wiki Dress, at least for me anyways. I loved watching things shift from dinosaurs to masquerades back to dinosaurs, and so on. Brian was at Recent Changes Camp 09, a conference at wikis, this last week (which is what inspired the post in the first place) and he reported that Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki, said at the “Creation Myths of Wiki” session that for a wiki to really work, “you have to believe that not done is better than done.” A perfectionist like me doesn’t always get that, but I feel like I did while watching the wiki get edited. I could let it go all year and see what people come up with — and I definitely want to draw some of the other outfits it produced. But to make things simple, I gave it a deadline this time, and this was the last outfit that got posted before noon on the 21st. I don’t like how the sheer purple part turned out, I forgot all about the gloves, the silver scrollwork turned into black scrollwork somewhere along the line and I took some artistic license on the shift, but I think it turned out pretty nicely! It was definitely interesting to draw…

Magic Wiki Dress: The Aftermath

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Thanks to everyone who added something to the Magic Wiki Dress! I had so much fun watching the dress evolve. Here’s the final version:

A purple bodice with a sweetheart neckline and basque waistline, embroidered
with light purple flowers over a floor length white shift whose neckline, with
a little lace, peeks out from under the bodice.
Over the shift, is a tulle skirt with the hem embroidered with
silver fancy scrollwork. Over that skirt is a
is a sheer purple skirt with train. It matches
the coloration of the purple bodice.

The sleeves of the white shift are visible under the bodice,
ending at the elbow.
The neckline is decorated with very small silver
and black accents- tiny sparkling swarovski crystals
in the center of small flower embellishments. The waist is
decorated with a slim swirly purplely pattern and small crystal
beads.

She also has a pair of satin gloves that reach to her wrist.
Each glove is embroidered with
a vine, winding around it and small purple flowers all along the glove.
On her feet are matching black satin slippers.

She also has a subtle webbed crystal frill tiara (with detachable
silk veil) with flower patterns and dripping tiny purple seed
pearls. Around her neck is a matching flower pendant made from
crystals. and she has subtle matching dangle earrings

However, I liked a lot of the other dresses that showed up, so I will probably draw a few of them as well next week. After all, I can’t resist tiny helpful pterodactyls, and I feel it is necessary that I prove to someone that blended harvest colors look lovely. So, thanks for doing the work for me for coming up with so many great ideas!

Click here to look at the revision history and get a sneak preview of what I’ll be drawing next week.

Magic Wiki Dress

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So my husband had this great idea: he suggested I draw a Wiki Dress. That is, have a wiki (a page that anyone can edit) with a dress description, let everyone edit it for a few days and draw the results. So please edit the wiki however you see fit: I’m going to leave this up until noon (eastern standard time) on the 21st and at that point I’ll draw what got described in the wiki.
Edited on the 20th: I love how the Wiki Dress is going. I don’t think I’ll be able to just draw the final version, as I had planned — I’ll draw a couple of suggested dresses instead. That means there will be dinosaurs, yes.
Edited on the 21st: The Magic Wiki Dress is done for now — thanks to everyone who had something to add!