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So one of the things I did with the Boutique was to draw dresses with the birthstone and flower associated with each month. Since that was fun, I’m going to give it a shot this year, too, so here is January with snowdrop embroidery and garnets. The design is intended to be vaguely angelic, but I don’t really like how it turned out… I guess I have 11 more tries this year.
Take the poll…
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I was going to do an unfortunate light-green colored mermaid this week, but it is the first of the month. You may remember from last week’s installment that mermaids associate light green with death, and even if it is a superstition I created with no basis in mythology or reality, it still seems inauspicious to start one’s month with an ill omen. Instead, since it’s getting snowy here, I thought I’d do a wintery-looking mermaid.
Now, mermaids tolerate cold temperatures very well; their clothes are almost entirely ornamental and they can swim around entirely naked if they choose, although for obvious reasons I end up focusing on the ones who opt for shirts and shells. So even the mermaids who live further to the north in colder waters, like this one, don’t have to do much covering up. Don’t be fooled by her sleeves, they provide about as much warmth as the average silk scarf and their only purpose is to swish fetchingly around her wrists as she chats animatedly with her friends.
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You thought I forgot about Mermaid Monday! I never forget about things, I just don’t do them and then become consumed by guilt.
The good thing about my October project is that it’s quite freeing not to worry in the least about what time period something is from or if it’s accurate or realistic. I started sketching for my ghost, ending up with something that looked like a ghostly Juliet (hence the reference in the text) and thought, well, is this OK? Is it like something from that time period? Maybe I’d better look it up… Then I realized it was a costume and I had perfect license not to care. Since with my historical dresses I attempt to stay in the style of the times right down to the year without just copying another dress, it can be difficult to do them properly. This month, I’m winging it! and it’s great!
The bad side is that most of my outfits are costumes in some way anyways, so the energy I don’t devote to thinking “is it accurate?” instead goes to “is it a costume?” There can be no mermaid costume in our world better than the costumes Iris and Sylvia already have access to, since our world does require feet. With imagination, most everything I’ve drawn is a costume already and my October project is redundant. (But fun!)
There are plenty of masquerades in the mermaid world, both among the mermaids and on land with the humans and elves, but the mermaids certainly don’t dress up like mermaids and for any of the others to do so would be in bad taste. No, this costume (really just a hobble skirt with ruffles sewn on the bottom) is most certainly from our world, and since here there are no real mermaids to compare it to it does its job well enough. What do mermaids dress up as for their Halloween, you might wonder? Unsurprisingly, they dress as things that scare them or things they aspire to, although mermaid takes on human culture are becoming popular as well. There are three more Mondays in the month, so we’ll see.
New poll on the 8th! So don’t neglect to take this one…
Click for larger version; click for the list of dolls.
This demure-seeming dress is actually not as innocent as one might think. It belongs to a videogame character named Cloud Strife; with each successive post-Final Fantasy VII appearance he makes, he becomes cooler and cooler. It’s as if to help us all forget that in FF7, rather shortly after you first meet him, you had to dress him up like a girl to gain access to the red light district. (The first time I played that part, I had my mom watching. Awkward.) Your female co-conspirators Tifa and Aeris have plunging necklines and bared arms in their chosen dresses, but with Cloud we are spared that vision…
FF7 has been on my mind recently on account of Brian starting to play it again, but our PS2 is now quite thoroughly kaput, and I don’t think he’ll have the heart to start it up again just to have it crash once more.
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