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Aelinora and Four Dresses, Free For Christmas!

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Liana's Paper Dolls Christmas 2014 Aelinora -- download for free until December 28! An adult female elf paper doll with straight blonde hair and green eyes. She's wearing a light blue dress with a V neck and an empire waist. The sleeves are long and semi-transparent, with silver designs up and down the arms, and the overskirt is open in the front, showing a light blue underskirt bordered with silver scrolls.Merry Christmas, to those who celebrate it; happy end of 2014, to everyone else! I’ve prepared a Christmas paperdoll based on a paperdoll I drew ten years ago: Aelinora, an elvish princess who gets bored of traditional elven Christmas celebrations and sneaks off to work at Santa’s workshop. She has four outfits (the two old ones won’t fit, I’m afraid) plus a little poem. The color and black and white PDFs are available as downloads on Gumroad for $2. It’s thanks to my mom – revisiting Aelinora was her idea.

Aelinora will have a bonus dress and short story available for free — but neither are done yet, so watch this space and I will get them up soon.

I’m excited about 2015 and I hope it brings wonderful things for all of you!

Aqua and Peach Elf Gown with Silver Beading

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An aqua-colored gown with three-quarter sleeves and a low boat neckline. It has princess seams and is covered all over with a delicate scroll pattern. At the base of the skirt, the color changes to light peach, and there's a silver beaded vine pattern along the hem. There's an peach underdress that shows at the neckline, extending a few inches above the top of the gown. The light peach scroll pattern on it shimmers subtly, and there's a row of beading along the neckline. There's silver lacing along the collar of the aqua gown, and the dress is open over the bust, showing the underdress. The lacing crosses three times over the opening and is fastened under the bust with a brooch of silver and a coral-colored gem, then the laces hang down nearly to the bottom of the gown. The sleeves have long, delicate lengths of semi-transparent scroll-patterned peach fabric that hang down nearly to the base of the dress at each cuff.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…

poll by twiigs.com

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.

Green and Red Elf Gown

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Click for larger version (PNG); click for PDF version. Click here for the list of dolls.

So this dude named Brian won my Academy Awards contest, and he wrote:

In an alternate version of “The Lord of The Rings”, the Council of Elrond determines that the only way to get the One Ring safely to Mordor is to deliver it using an iconic promotional vehicle from 20th century American culture. Please color the black and white elf gown (with circlet) to suit an fair elfin maiden as she pilots the following vehicle to Mordor: http://bit.ly/bmJLcf

This guy is obviously bad news, but he won, so I guess I’d better humor him…

Nah, just kidding. He’s my beloved husband, which usually disqualifies him from my contests, but since I was open to having multiple winners for that particular contest I thought I might as well give him a chance for once. I rather ended up regretting it; somehow, when faced with such a description, my normal creativity deserted me entirely.

“I won it fair and square,” he says. “Not saying ya didn’t,” I reply. “But I’m excluded from the future ones, right?” “Well, I usually reset it every year…” “I’m excluded for bad behavior.” “Yeah, I think so.”

Anyways, I’ve put it off for all this time, but I thought I had better just get it done and hopefully never think of it again. So here we have the ketchup-swirled tunic with mustard yellow borders over a gown patterned with an abstract relish-and-white onion design; a mustard yellow circlet completes the ensemble. Oh well. This is why I do the paperdolls and he writes snarky things on Twitter.

Help me get the taste of this one out of my mouth (rimshot) – let’s do a new contest! Thanks to Brian for suggesting the question for me, as penance. Winner, as always, gets to tell me how to color a black-and-white dress (and please please choose pretty colors).

What (present-day) US state was my great-grandfather born in? At the time, my great-great-grandparents owned a hardware store in a boom town.

Update: Nikki guessed it! He was born in Skagway, Alaska.

Colored Elf Gown in Blues and Greys with Grey Lavender Edges and Silver Trim

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Click for larger version (PNG); click for PDF version. Click here for the list of dolls.

Emily won my last contest, for guessing that I had had visitors from 115 countries last week, and this was her request: “Can I choose a dress that has already been colored? Because if so I would like the Lord of the Rings elf gown from 10/5/09, but (kind of opposite of how it was colored before) in blues and grays, maybe a bit of very blueish lavender, and silver trim.” I really like how it turned out… hope you do too, Emily! (And don’t worry, trazy, I haven’t forgotten yours! I just want to do it justice, and I’ve messed up on the pattern too many times today…)

In my imagination, the elf who wears this dress and the one who wears today’s dress are good friends. The one who loves bright colors (we’ll call her Cathiel) has, over the years, influenced her friend’s color sense; you can thank her for the purple at the edges of this one, which seems quite muted to her but was a big leap forward for her sober-minded friend, who we’ll call Rhylar. It also means that she can thank her mother and aunt (who, unsurprisingly, disapprove of her style) quite sincerely for their optimistic gifts of pearl grey and clay rose robes: she assures them that she will put them to good use, and she does. They make wonderful gifts for the more conventional Rhylar. They like to find a picturesque spot and practice duets; Cathiel is a middling flutist, while Rhylar is decent on her harp, but a gifted singer. Often the former will lay aside her flute, close her eyes and just listen to her beloved friend sing a song or two, and if part of her attention wanders and she mentally changes Rhylar’s rust-colored gown to a snappy, sunshiny yellow, it only heightens her enjoyment of the scene.

poll by twiigs.com