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Halloween Costume Series Day 5: Green Princess Gown with Pink Rose Trim and Gold Lace

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So what if “princess” is possibly the least imaginative costume for anyone past second grade? It’s pretty, and if there’s anything I like in this world it is pretty dresses. I believe, now, that I may be the foremost non-Disney expert on what makes a dress princess-worthy, for these are the kinds of things one thinks about when one draws lots of paper dolls.

I don’t know much about the owner of this dress except that she does like her roses, and I would be surprised if she cultivates them herself as the owner of this pink princess gown does. No, this princess is a bit of a terror, and she insisted that her dress should lend her a sort of mature innocence, that it should be both heavy and light, serious and frilly, and highly becoming to her porcelain complexion and rich brown hair. It it is no coincidence that her dressmaker took a very long vacation after its completion. But this, I think, is not the kind of princess to worry too much about the anguish of such people. I for one hope the dressmaker got far enough away not to hear about the princess saying, at her next ball, “Oh, this old thing? You like it? It’s just an old rag I had lying around in my closet.”

The veil should be cut between the gold part and the white fabric, such that the doll’s head can be slipped through and the gold band goes around the forehead while the veil flutters behind.

Take my new poll:

poll by twiigs.com

Two Halloween Costumes (Princess and Cat) from Liana’s Paperdoll Boutique

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So, I do all my drawings with Prismacolor colored pencils, and I almost always use a special pencil called the colorless blender for the finishing touch. Essentially it smooths the colors together; sometimes it makes the colors vibrant, sometimes it makes color gradients look perfect, sometimes it actually changes the colors. It’s what makes mermaid tails so pretty, basically. And mine wore down to a little pencil stub, and I thought I had a replacement but I don’t. (I think I need to start buying them by the bushel.) So for tonight I’m just going to put up some more Boutique costumes and tomorrow go and get another blender pencil or two so I can continue the paperdoll outfit I was working on. Anyways, here we have a princess costume and a cat costume. Tonight’s costume was to be a princess gown, actually, but then I ran out of colorless blender… look forwards to it tomorrow!

I made a new poll:

poll by twiigs.com

Halloween Costume Series Day 1: The Good Queen’s Ghost

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I can’t tell you why someone who was called “The Good Queen” during her life now haunts a ruined castle of no consequence; queens don’t tell their secrets to paper doll artists. I took on the assignment in the hope of a good story to deliver to my readers, but she condescended to tell me very little about her life, although she was quick to tell me that I had the bodice quite wrong, that I was obviously phoning in the lace, and so on. The older history books paint a glorious picture of her, but I couldn’t help but think that the historians that speculate that the epithet “The Good Queen” was applied to her much like “the Kindly Ones” was applied to the three Furies very well may be on to something. My romantic mind first imagined that she plunged the dagger into her own heart for love, a pre-cursor (possibly inspiration?) to Juliet, and I still think she died by her own hand but the more I sat with her the more I sensed her desperation and anger, and despite her annoyance with my lace, I don’t think it was directed at me. Now I feel her death had nothing to do with love but rather with intrigue of some sort, a power play that went wrong enough to bind her to this world. Still, I’m dying to know what’s with the blood on her hem, but if she will not tell me, fine; in a few hundred years her power will wane further and she’ll wind up telling anybody, probably a bunch of thirteen-year-old girls staring into a bathroom mirror at midnight, just for one last chance at peace.

poll by twiigs.com

Two Fantasy Princess Gowns from Liana’s Paperdoll Boutique

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Here are two of the fantasy gowns from my old Boutique site. The blue and white one seems to have a sort of military character to it, to me, like a Valkyrie ballgown, and I like the red on the other one…

I’ve been thinking about what constitutes a “Princess” gown, mostly because the three-pack of Kleenex my husband brought home when we were sick includes one box with the Disney Princess girls on it. (He was pretty sick too at this point, I doubt he thought anything but “wife needs kleenex, kleenex exists in these boxes, these boxes are available for purchase, go go go”) All of them have had some significant wardrobe additions since the Princess line came out: I’ve seen these gold dress variations a few times, and the Kleenex box has something similar to that, although the dresses are the original colors. Everything else is changed: every inch of fabric that can have gold scrolls or ropes of jewels or lace and embroidery now does, and there are other embellishments such as jeweled capes, lacy ruffs, tiaras and more detailed sleeves. Sleeping Beauty’s looks like she’s got a Venus flytrap on her shoulders, in my opinion, and I wish I could find a picture of this so everyone could agree with me. The box says that it’s the newest Disney Princess collection, “Jewels,” but I can’t find any pictures.

Anyways, I must admit that it delights my inner 10-year old, but it made me think of some of Amy Mebberson’s Disney drawings of the characters that didn’t make the core Princess group cut, such as Kida and Eilonwy — here’s one of the “Non Princess Club and here’s Disney’s Forgotten Princesses So I thought it would be fun to draw a dress for one of the girls left out of the Princess club in this poofy Bedazzled “Jewels” style… I’m not going to post a poll since there are so many options, but leave a comment and tell me who you think should have their dress redone!

Looking at the Non-Princess Club, I think it’d be fun to do a dress from the Sprite from Fantasia, but I’m open to suggestions on this one…