Click for larger version; click for the list of dolls.
So it turns out that Hulu has Some Like It Hot available for free, and I just had to watch it yesterday. Marilyn’s really good dresses have see-through parts, ruling them out for my paperdolls, but I liked this one that she wears near the beginning, even if I’m not quite sure I got the details right.
Click for larger version; click for the list of dolls.
Now, I don’t read People or any of that, beyond what I can’t help skimming at the checkout line or if I’m reeeally bored at the dentist’s office. I don’t mean to be snobby about it — I’ve certainly got enough nerdy, timewasting obsessions to make up for the lack of this particular one — but the whole celebrity gossip thing just never has been quite my thing. Except… for the blog Go Fug Yourself. It’s shallow, catty and downright hilarious. I think the appeal, for me, is something like, “Here is this gorgeous woman, and she has looks and money and access and stylists, and she’s at some amazing event where she knows there will be pictures taken of her and… she is wearing… what? why?” I haven’t a particle of style and I don’t really follow fashion, but even I’ve got better sense than to wear a dress like this.
And now they’re doing their Fug Madness, and I was Team Peldon, but then she got spanked by Sharon Stone. So I switched my allegiance to Team Bai for the final rounds. (That would be Bai Ling. “She was in Star Wars, right?” says Brian. Among the followers of Go Fug Yourself, that isn’t precisely what she’s known for.) She and Posh are squaring off on Monday, and I have total confidence in my girl Bai… Posh just doesn’t have the crazy I associate with quality fug.
So this is an outfit that Bai wore sometime in 2007 and, the more I look at it the fonder I am of it, actually. I mean, that skirt.
Click for larger version; click for the doll.
A weakness of mine, nine or ten years ago when I was drawing dresses like these for the Paperdoll Boutique, was always letting my desire for perfection (or completion, perhaps) take over, ultimately impeding what I actually wanted to do. It wasn’t enough to have one great outfit from a movie: they all had beauty and value and it was only worth doing if I did them all. Ideas and dresses I felt obligated to do crowded my mind and at a certain point it is easier to accept getting nothing done than it is to accept you can’t do everything you want to do. I do this all the time, and not just with paperdolls; I combat this tendency by drawing one thing a day, none if I’m just not feeling it (like tonight *yawn*) and not holding myself responsible for paperdolling every beautiful dress humans have ever created, or feeling guilty if I can’t draw everything waiting for its turn in my head.
But now I look back and I’m sometimes pretty impressed by the dedication I had to chronicling every single bit of something that I felt needed paperdolling. There are five in this group, here are two: and I guarantee you that at the time I felt bad that I didn’t get her dress from the ball.
Click for larger version; click for the list of dolls.
“Do you like our owl?”
Yeah, this owl, the Official Kerr Family Owl:
Brian and I saw Blade Runner on the big screen the other day, and it was glorious, much like Rachael’s hair when it’s freed from those tight rolls. I don’t know if the book described really ugly clothes as Ubik did (now there’s a paperdoll I haven’t done yet that cries for a yellow houndstooth poncho and green leather boots!), but if it did the movie was ever so faithful to it. I just about cried whenever there was a closeup on Deckard’s shirt, that thing was perfectly hideous. But this outfit that Rachael wears in the beginning I liked, even if I can’t quite add the achingly noir cigarette smoke, and even if it did turn out a shade more “grey” then “black,” and even if the shoulder pads aren’t quite padded enough…
(Yes, incidentally, Brian is a graduate of the Calvin School of Art…)
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