lace

Iris, African-American Paperdoll with Lavender Wrap Dress

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So, I want to try to do more dolls, and here’s the first product of that! She doesn’t have a name yet, feel free to suggest one. (Edit: Thanks to everyone who suggested a name: I decided on one of Min’s suggestions, Iris.) Her hair is taken from one of Rihanna’s hairstyles, and she’s from the same base as Sylvia, of course, so she should fit most of the outfits I’ve already drawn — there may be some variations between the two, though, so let me know if anything using her REALLY doesn’t fit right.

As always, doing the people is always my weak point… I ought to practice more, I know…

White Dressing Gown with Black Lace and Black Ribbons

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I drew this just to practice drawing lace. You see, my Anna Karenina gown is one of my favorite ever paperdoll outfits, and if Sylvia is ever to have a ballgown that she can wear beside Anna’s black lace gown with pride, I should make sure I can do lace. Sure, she has Margaret Hale’s, but I just didn’t see her as being the type of girl to wear a huge frothy concoction, and so that’s not what I drew for her. I actually forgot how I did Anna’s lace, so I kind of have to relearn it, but it should be easier to do lace well this time, because I bought a set of the Prismacolor Verithin pencils. You’ve been seeing them all over since I first got them: the gold on Ashe’s wedding dress owes a lot to the dark brown, the embroidery for the St. Patrick’s Day outfit is all Verithin, the blue details on the copper mermaid’s top are done with it as well. You wouldn’t really get intense colors with them like you do with the regular ones, but you can do details so much more easily… If I tried to do the black lace with the regular black, I’d have a black pencil about half an inch long left over, after sharpening it every half second. The only problem is that the only Verithin grey I have is warm grey 20%, and that’s too light on its own to do white lace– I need a 30%, or at least a darker one — and I don’t even know where I can buy them individually. So for today, I did black lace instead of white.

Since I couldn’t do white on white with colored ribbons quite the way I wanted it to work out (my original scheme) I wanted this dressing gown to be totally over the top and fabulous. If I was Scarlett O’Hara or Jennifer Lopez, I would buy this and swan around in it all day long. This is as close to “diva” as I really get!

Red, Black and Gold Captain’s Outfit based on Puzzle Pirates

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I downloaded Puzzle Pirates the other day — it just looked too cute not to give it a try. And indeed it was very cute, and I played a good deal of it for a couple of days. There’s a lot of puzzles to try, although I only really liked one or two of them, and the world is fun too: you can do puzzles by yourself, but you can also do them as a team, everyone working on a different kind of puzzle to make your little pirate ship sail smoothly, and it’s a lot more fun doing puzzles when you feel like it’s contributing to the speed of the ship or patching up the holes. You can also buy items for your house, or cute clothes to wear, which is where today’s paperdoll comes in.

The game has a lot of different items of clothing you can buy, and then the colors can be customized. Today’s paperdoll is based on a captain’s hat, a buccaneer jacket, flare pants and buckle shoes. One interesting thing about the clothing system is that different colors cost different amounts; this ensemble uses two of the most expensive colors, black and gold, making the estimated cost well over $100,000. Changing the colors to brown, green and white lowers it to about $7,000. So, of course, Sylvia is an admirable pirate, very skilled at plundering and puzzles, and wears plenty of black and gold. (My in-game character wears plenty of white and a shirt she got for free.)

I found this site when thinking about this paperdoll: Quid Pro Clothes, which is the website for one of the in-game tailors. (Players can just do puzzles, like me, or they can get into the metagame and the economy and start their own stores, buy their own ships, etc.) This site essentially removes much of my need to play the game, because of one reason: if you sign up for the site, it lets you play with the clothes without having to spend hours and hours saving the money first. You can also look at other people’s creations; I like this take on the Greek gods.

On a side note, apologies to Mom for driving her crazy today as I enlist her help in resume creation. “Remember it goes like this: letter first, paperdoll second” she says.

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.