pirate

Queens of the Sea #4: Jacket and Pants for Anne Bonny

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

Welcome to day four of the Queens of the Sea series, part of the Random Magic Pirates book tour! Here is the mini-bio for today’s pirate, provided again by Lyrika:

Anne Bonny: The Southern Spitfire

The illegitimate daughter of an Irish lawyer, who left Ireland for the colony of South Carolina (at the time, there was no United States of America, the settlements were all colonies of the British Empire) and became a merchant.

She married a small-time pirate but ran away with Jack ‘Calico Jack’ Rackham after they met on the island of New Providence in the Bahamas, a pirate lair of the time.

A comrade of pirate Mary Read, Anne Bonny was captured along with Mary Read and Jack Rackham in a pirate hunter raid but mysteriously vanished from historical records after being imprisoned, although Mary died in jail and Jack was executed.

You can read more about Anne Bonny at The Epic Rat on May 17th, as part of the Queens of the Sea series. (I’ll update the link after it’s been posted.)

Now, with Anne Bonny, one of the most famous female pirates, the outfits are getting a little more traditionally pirate-looking… You will have to imagine her carrying pistols, though, that’s far out of my area of expertise! This whole series is a little out of my area of expertise, really — I’ve drawn more pants this month than I probably did all last year — but I’m enjoying it, and I hope you are too!

Don’t forget to enter my contests! They’re open until the end of the tour. Click here for the chance to win an original drawing, for those of you who can give me an address if you win, and click here for the chance to design a pirate outfit, open to everyone!

Check out the tour schedule here! And for more information about Random Magic, here’s the trailer for the book.

Also, check out the Rum + Plunder treasure hunt for more pirate prizes!

Hm, let’s have a poll, I haven’t done one for a while… How about a nice long one?

poll by twiigs.com

Queens of the Sea #2: Lai Choi San’s White Satin Robe

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

Welcome to day two of the Queens of the Sea series, part of the Random Magic Pirates book tour! Here is the mini-bio for today’s pirate, provided again by Lyrika:

Lai Choi San
The Queen of Macau Pirates
(or)
The Jade Empress
(or)
The Enigmatic Empress

Lai Choi San was a 20th century Chinese pirate, who prowled the South
China Sea during the 1920s and into the 1930s.

She commanded a fleet of a dozen junks based in the South China
Sea. Finnish adventurer and freelance writer Aleko E. Lilius managed to find a way to
work among her crews, and he recounts his impression of the
cool-headed commander this way:

‘What a woman she was! Rather slender and short, her hair jet black,
with jade pins gleaming in the knot at the neck, her earrings and
bracelets of the same precious apple-green stone.

She was exquisitely dressed in a white satin robe fastened with green
jade buttons, and green silk slippers. She wore a few plain gold rings
on her left hand; her right hand was unadorned. Her face and dark eyes
were intelligent…and rather hard. She was probably not yet forty.

Every move she made and every word she spoke told plainly that she
expected to be obeyed, and as I had occasion to learn later, she was
obeyed.’ (I Sailed with Chinese Pirates (1931), Aleko E. Lilius

Lai Cho San was also the inspiration for a 1930s comic strip,
Terry and the Pirates, featuring a
cold-blooded villainess, The Dragon Lady. The series, by artist Milton
Caniff, sparked a radio series (1937-1948) and a later TV series
in the early 1950s.

You can read more about Lai Choi San at In the Library of LadyViolet, as part of the Queens of the Sea series.

It was kind of Lilius to describe her outfit so well, wasn’t it? That made today’s overall design very easy to come up with, meaning that I could spend less time thinking about it and more time admiring pictures of 1920s-era vintage Chinese robes. I could have sworn that the word “necklaces” appeared in that description at some point, though. Oh well. I’m sure she had a least a couple of necklaces!

Imagine trying to keep a white satin outfit like that clean anywhere near a ship… Even if it’s not what she might have worn on duty, so to speak, it can’t have been easy. I imagine that’s one perk of what was no doubt a generally rough existence — she could task some poor underling with the duty of keeping her clothes immaculate. Although, given that she may have never existed at all, I suppose a fantasy character could keep all manner of delicate white clothing perfectly clean.

Don’t forget to enter my contests! Click here for the chance to win an original drawing, for those of you who can give me an address if you win, and click here for the chance to design a pirate outfit, open to everyone!

I wanted to clarify one thing about the first contest – it’s open to international visitors as well as domestic ones. And yes, all you have to do is post a comment to enter — although it is a little boring for me to watch the comments roll in, next time I do something like this, I will make people write something more imaginative! But I won’t change the rules on you mid-stream, this time.

Don’t forget: check out the tour schedule here! And for more information about Random Magic, here’s the trailer for the book.

Also, check out the Rum + Plunder treasure hunt for more pirate prizes!

Halloween Costume Series Day 3: Fancy Lady Pirate In Red, Black and Gold with Plumed Tricorn Hat

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Reading smalltown mom’s blog has put me in a nautical mood, so…

The most powerful pirates wore whatever they pleased, and that was as much of a sign of their power as the fancy ships or fantastic treasures that they posessed. Among the cabal of the fifty or so most elite of the lords of the sea, it was understood that there was no need for artifice or the peacock-like preening of the lesser pirates; when you were that good at what you did, any excess started to look tacky. Captain Christopher Blood, feared master of the legendary Dreadfall, often wore a simple shirt and trousers and went barefoot, making him look for all the world like a new recruit, while Lady Bethany Star was fond of simple shifts without the slightest bit of embellishment. (Since she loved snow white linen and her clothes were so routinely bloodstained, it was actually more efficient to buy a year’s worth of shifts at once than to add the job of washing them properly to her favorite attendant’s duties.)

It was really only those still trying to make names for themselves who fussed over their buttonholes and silks, donning ropes of trade beads and piling feathers onto their tricorn hats until they looked like they might very well fly off themselves. The poorest of recruits with any ambition at all would soon have at least a snazzy handkerchief to show off, even if the rest of his clothes were castoffs older than he was. Extravagant flamboyancy was the look everyone aimed for, but make the mistake of snickering at a young pirate dandy with his waistcoat so adorned with lace it looked like a skirt and you’d be lucky to get away with interesting designs carved down your back and a majority of your fingers.

My pirate girl, Elaine Morgain, is well on her way up. No ship of her own yet, and not as much jewelry as she would like, but she’s got plans. In the meantime, she’s her current captain’s right hand and the second-best shot among the crew, she’s faced down some tricky situations (the most notable of which was surviving being marooned for a month, then having a delicious revenge a full year later) and she’s gained a reputation in certain circles for charisma, ruthlessness and the devil’s own luck. Not bad, she thinks, for someone who started pirate life with a dress barely patched together and a couple of throwing knives. (And yes, throwing knives have a place on a pirate ship. You have to be extra skilled to use them right, though.)

To cut out the left sleeve, cut around the lace, then put the hand over the skirt; to cut out the hat, cut on the white lines. (It may need to be cut past where I have the lines, though. Call it a guideline.)

Take this week’s poll!

poll by twiigs.com

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.