dress

Princess Ashe’s Wedding Dress from Final Fantasy XII

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So I started playing Final Fantasy XII again recently. (It works nicely with my job. For my fifteen minute breaks, I do dishes and pick up, and on my half-hour break I go beat up some skeletons.) I think the thing I love most about the game is the lushly textured world design… everything is just so pretty. Funny, then, that I don’t really like the character designs for the main characters, except Fran and Balthier. (Don’t get me started on Penelo’s weird leather wings … or Ashe’s little sailor collar… or Vaan the most well-dressed orphaned urchin ever … or Basch’s potholder) I was thinking that I should paperdoll the NPCs, because each major area has its own style, and the female townspeople always looked really cool to me, especially the Arcades women. Luckily, I found a great Ashe shrine that has screen captures of the dress, plus the original concept art, which meant I got to abandon my half-hearted sketch of her regular costume and go for this one instead!

This is Ashe’s wedding dress, and you see it in the very first part of the game, followed soon after by her mourning dress. If I didn’t do the wedding dress, I’d have done a white dress she wears that I also liked, which as it turns out is just a white and grey version of her mourning dress. Maybe another day…

Scanner messed this one up too, but I fixed it up well enough. Does anyone have any idea why it does that? It scans intially sort of softer and the colors are true to the page, then when the scan or preview is done, the colors get more saturated and it looks kind of like someone ran a sharpen filter on the whole thing…

Moxie’s Tonic’s pink shirtwaist inspired by Pushing Daisies

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So I saw that Moxie Tonic had linked to me, and when I clicked through the first thing I saw was this sweet, hot pink dress she had made. It’s inspired by a character’s dress from a TV series called Pushing Daisies, although she made some changes to it. I don’t actually use hot pink much, so of course I wanted to try paperdolling it… It’s not quite like the original, I’m afraid, I think I didn’t get the collar right at all, and there’s too many buttons. I’ll pretend that it’s so blindingly pink no one will notice…

Sadly, though, my scanner kind of ate this one — I don’t know why, but when I scanned it, it previewed normally, but the actual colors ended up being weirdly super-saturated — yes, it’s possible even for hot pink — and it seemed to come out more… coarse, somehow. Lily’s gown yesterday did that too. (Plus this one has a few bands on the skirt…) It means I had to play around in Photoshop and try to make the coloring look like what I had, although it’s a lot less pink now, and it’s not so bad when resized. (The large image you see is 25% of the original, which ends up hiding a lot of flaws.) When I get a new scanner, I’m rescanning it, and then you all can enjoy how it’s supposed to be. On the upside, the dress looks pretty cute in blue, too.

Lily Bart’s White Edwardian Tea Gown with Pink Rose Sash from The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

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Now that I’m done with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, I do think it’s time for another depressing period piece. This time I’m listening to The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, read for Librivox by Elizabeth Klett. I’ve read it before, but I’m actually preferring audiobooks lately because I don’t skim so much and get more of the details, and I’ve been thinking of this book since I read this New York Times article about Lily’s fate…

So far there hasn’t been much description of individual dresses, but there’s so much about the culture that those dresses form such a part of. Here’s Lily Bart talking about marriage with Lawrence Selden: “Your coat’s a little shabby–but who cares? It doesn’t keep people from asking you to dine. If I were shabby no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself. The clothes are the background, the frame, if you like: they don’t make success, but they are a part of it. Who wants a dingy woman? We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed till we drop–and if we can’t keep it up alone, we have to go into partnership.”

Well, even if the book does promise to be melancholy, there is a silver lining: the dresses from the Belle Époque are beautiful, even if Sylvia isn’t quite the desired S-shape. I remember later on she wears some form of white dress, but there’s not a lot of physical description in the book so it’s based more on vintage gowns from 1904 and 1905 I’ve been looking at, particularly this one.

Spring Dress Based Off Of The New Yorker Fashion Issue Cover

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The New Yorker Fashion issue arrived the other day, and I loved the cover, so I drew a dress based off of the pattern. I think it looks nice and springy, if a little busy…

I always enjoy the fashion issue, probably because I love clothes and I don’t have a particle of style myself!