crystals

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

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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!

Wiki Dress #2: Gold Harvest Gown with Green Peplum and Celtic Patterns

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Now, I happen to know my mom edited this revision of this dress, and therefore it had to be drawn, because my mom’s awesome. I think I ought to ask her to design me dresses more often when I’m feeling unimaginative! She’s also more dangerous with the Prismacolors than I am – she does absolutely gorgeous drawings of flowers and plants on cards, then sends them to people. She jokes that you only get to come to her funeral if you got a drawing from her. Here was her description of the dress:

A sunflower yellow bodice,green peplum with a beyond floor-length skirt done in blended colors of harvest. The hem is heavily decorated with a matching line of Celtic designs in dark blue, with golden accents.

The neckline is decorated with very small dark gold and blue accents, with tiny sparkling swarovski crystals and blue pearls in the center. The waist is decorated with a slim swirly golden pattern and small crystal beads, and the skirt is draped, cascading down to the floor.

She also has a pair of long dark green gloves that reach halfway up. The back of each hand is embroidered with harvest and Celtic designs. On her feet are soft blue satin slippers.She also has a subtle webbed crystal frill tiara (worn front-to-back)with dripping tiny blue seed pearls. Around her neck is a matching crystal and single pearl necklace.

I guess you have to imagine the satin slippers, and there wasn’t enough space on the glove for a harvest design, but I think this came out really nicely and hopefully close to what Mom was imagining. This is one where I wish I could show you all the original — the harvest colors on the skirt are a lot prettier on the real thing. It made me decidedly twitchy to finish coloring the skirt, then draw patterns all over the hem, but it worked, I think!

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…

Blue Watery Masquerade Ball Gown with Satin Blue Underskirt and Crystals

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So recently, I got an e-mail from Diana asking if I could draw a dress for a roleplay she was taking part in. I went through and read the scenario, and Diana’s character Leslie is a human spy in a magical world who has to infiltrate a masquerade ball attended by aristocrats. So I thought this was a fun challenge: what sort of thing might a spy wear to such a ball? It’s dead easy to make a gown that says “hey everyone, look at me!” or one that says “I am a Woman of Mystery” but one that looks expensive and magical enough that no one questions its wearer’s right to be there, yet isn’t so noticeable that everyone winds up talking about her… fun. I ended up going with blue, a rich but soothing color, and an overskirt with fabric like shimmering water and seafoam, studded with crystals — although I don’t really think the crystals worked out too well. Oh well. Diana, I hope you like it anyways, and I look forward to seeing where the story goes!

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