pink

My Fair Lady dresses from Liana’s Paperdoll Boutique

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A weakness of mine, nine or ten years ago when I was drawing dresses like these for the Paperdoll Boutique, was always letting my desire for perfection (or completion, perhaps) take over, ultimately impeding what I actually wanted to do. It wasn’t enough to have one great outfit from a movie: they all had beauty and value and it was only worth doing if I did them all. Ideas and dresses I felt obligated to do crowded my mind and at a certain point it is easier to accept getting nothing done than it is to accept you can’t do everything you want to do. I do this all the time, and not just with paperdolls; I combat this tendency by drawing one thing a day, none if I’m just not feeling it (like tonight *yawn*) and not holding myself responsible for paperdolling every beautiful dress humans have ever created, or feeling guilty if I can’t draw everything waiting for its turn in my head.

But now I look back and I’m sometimes pretty impressed by the dedication I had to chronicling every single bit of something that I felt needed paperdolling. There are five in this group, here are two: and I guarantee you that at the time I felt bad that I didn’t get her dress from the ball.

Pink and Red Fairy Dress from Liana’s Paperdoll Boutique

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Honestly, I wasn’t quite feeling the whole paperdolling thing today after having three starts to another outfit go bad, so I decided to redraw one of the old Boutique fairy outfits. I’m not really thrilled with it, but it’s better than not posting anything at all…

Pink and Yellow Chiffon 1940s Evening Gown Via Damn Good Vintage

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Julie the Vintage Goddess linked to me recently and said some very kind things about my dolls. She also buys and sells vintage clothing from her site Damn Good Vintage, so I was looking through her site and her blog for some inspiration when I found this post, “You Can’t Save Them All”. It tells of her attempts to restore two dresses, one of which was too stained to save, and one of which was a yellow and pink chiffon 1940s evening gown that cleaned up nicely, but tore easily and couldn’t be saved either. Well, if there’s one thing paperdolls are good for, it’s to right the wrongs of damage and time. Or to put it simply, Paperdolls 1, Real Life 0.

Liana’s Paperdoll Boutique Formal Dresses, Part 1

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I find myself, at the time of this writing, with a terrible headache and no drawings stored up in reserve… so instead of silence I thought I’d post some of my old Boutique dresses and one of the dolls.

When I was in high school and college, I ran a site called “Liana’s Paperdoll Boutique” for which I drew dresses and dolls. It got to be really rather sprawling, and was great fun, although my laziness, perfectionism and inability to really focus on more than one thing with  all my heart caught up to me and it slipped away at some point. These are from that old site.

I don’t remember which birthday it was when I got my set of 120 Prismacolors — though I bet my mom could — but in any case, these date somewhere to maybe sophomore or junior year of high school, 1997, 1998. (I’m very bad with dates…) I still remember details about some of them… the blue dress was a request from some paperdoll fan, and the gold dress was my first try at gold, and really my technique hasn’t changed too much. Also, I don’t do the outlines with black ink anymore, and I use the colorless blender instead of white… I don’t think my dolls look a lot better, though, and I post this one with some embarrassment, but hey, it’s history!