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1965 Leopard Print Bikini from How To Stuff A Wild Bikini

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

Does it look like I’m phoning it in today? Technically I phoned it in earlier this week and then couldn’t upload the finished drawing, got distracted and whoops it’s Thursday already? Sorry about that.

Anyways, How To Stuff A Wild Bikini is one of those 1960s “beach party” movies, and for my money it’s got to be one of the stupidest pieces of entertainment I’ve ever encountered, but since I didn’t pay for it that doesn’t mean much. I watched it on Hulu the other day, for some reason… I think I must have been bored, and the name floated into my mind from when I was on a Buster Keaton kick a while back, because he plays the shaman. Anyways, if you can turn your brain off entirely, it’s reasonably fun and silly, the Bewitched shout-out is hilarious and I liked the costumes (I had no idea until I was reading later that the lead actress was actually pregnant at the time – nice disguising work!) This is the wild bikini of the title – that is to say, it actually spends some time walking around on its own – plus headband. I am not quite sure it would stay on the paperdoll, so good luck with that.

The exact number of colored pencils I ordered was 69, so that makes Melanie Ann’s guess of 72 the closest. Melanie Ann, please post in the comments how you’d like me to color the princess gown and I’ll post it soon!

1780s White Chemise à la Reine with Blue Silk Sash and Flower Ornament

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Well, now, it looks like the readers of this blog have what you could call a slight preference for The Duchess’ costumes (a lovely gallery of which can be found at the Costumer’s Guide to Movie Costumes); as I write this it’s garnered 66% of the vote, with the other four neatly splitting the remainder. Not much of a surprise, we do like our fancy gowns around this joint after all. The possible list of leaked Oscar winners would be against us, preferring Benjamin Button instead, but that has all the authenticity of, well, a random list on the Internet.

I didn’t see The Duchess, or, sadly, any of the other Best Costume nominees, but I wanted to draw something inspired by its main character, Georgiana Cavendish, not the least because I recently discovered the The Duchess of Devonshire’s Gossip Guide to the 18th Century (and its counterpart concerned with Marie Antoinette) and since I’ve never been much into 1700s fashion before (I love the 1800s, everything before that I’m real vague on) I’ve been enjoying it. Well, lo and behold there is a style of dress that Marie Antoinette started and Georgiana introduced to England, so that seemed to be the right thing to draw tonight. It’s called the chemise à la reine, and it was quite scandalous when it was introduced in the mid-1780s because it was essentially like wearing one’s underwear out in public, not what one expects from one’s queen. A very simple garment, it was really the precursor of the Regency gowns as the waistline inched upwards.

Don’t forget — livedolling the Oscars here, tomorrow! Stick around the comments section and help me decide what to draw. I’ll be looking frantically for streaming video of the red carpet show (more interesting than reloading Getty Images all the time), let me know if you know where to find it.

poll by twiigs.com

Red B&L Axiom Jumpsuit from WALL•E

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Brian and I went to go see Wall-E yesterday; these red jumpsuits are what the humans on board the Axiom wear. (And don’t forget, blue is the new red.) I don’t remember exactly how they look, and it’s impossible to find pictures of the humans, so it might be slightly off. I truly enjoyed it; it was less preachy and not as cruel about fat people as I had feared it might be. For one, it’s not as simple as “everyone would be better without any STUFF” — Wall-E treasured some of the things he found, using them creatively and learning from them. I don’t have a problem with too much stuff, myself — two moves in seven months will do that to you — so I didn’t go home with a burning determination to reduce my wasteful ways, although I do want to get my compost bin started… The heart of the story, of course, was Wall-E and Eve (and the other robots, too, were a lot more important than the humans — but I can’t very well make an Eve outfit, just cut out an oval, give her a monitor face and little blue eyes…) and that was really quite sweet. Brian, of course, nitpicked the mechanics of space travel, but that is Brian. The movie made me quite sad that the apartment landscaping people weed-whacked our growing flower bed that morning, but in the spirit of Encouraging the Green Growing Things, we went right back out and bought some more seeds…