tentacles

The Mythic Ball, Part 2: Kraken’s Purple and Silver Gown with Tentacles

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An off-the-shoulder dress with fin-like webbing on the upper arms, a corset top, a tight, sparkly silver skirt edged with more fin-like webbing and several tentacles coming from the skirt and spilling over the floor. The corset is patterned with an abstract tentacle pattern and is a deep purple. It's made of shiny fabric which is nearly pink where the light hits it, and the top of the corset is covered in sparkly silver glitter. The fin-like webbing is done in garish shades of yellow, orange and magenta. The skirt is gathered at the back and drapes over the front from the waist to the knees in graceful folds, and the entire skirt is covered in silver sequins that glitter as they catch the light. The silhouette suggests a late 1800s gown, although the colors, glitter and tentacles don't. There are about ten tentacles, shiny and colored in shades of purple, with large suckers on them. They fall towards the ground, where they spill out and curl around on the floor. There's also a shiny silver mask to go with the outfit.

Kraken had been a favorite in the Victorian era, then airplanes came along, things went poorly for her and she had slunk around the edges of the party for some time. But these days, she’s trendy again. Downright hip, in a way that ever-popular Dragon can’t be: a t-shirt screenprinted with a dragon runs the risk of being cliché and laughable, but Kraken-themed accessories have creepy steampunk style. She suggests mystery, complexity, and a hint of the taboo (as the Great Old Ones are pointedly not invited to the festivities).

Her habit of arriving at the ball with a gleeful cry of “Release the Kraken!” is getting a little old, but no one’s had the nerve to suggest a more subtle entrance to her; Kraken simply doesn’t do subtle, as her flashy dress might suggest. Plus, she has a theatrical streak a mile wide: when Vampire gave her a disdainful look and told her that her ensemble was “very Ursula” Kraken just grinned and started belting out “Poor Unfortunate Souls” right there. Can there be anything better, Kraken thought to herself, than showing off a popular sea-monster themed show tune and mortifying Vampire in the same night? She can think of a few things, but it’s enough of a triumph for this particular quarter of an hour.

Help me out — I have plans to introduce three more guests this month, and I know who two of them are but I’m not sold on the third…

poll by twiigs.com

Who comes next? I’ll give you a hint: if you recognize next week’s archetype you can congratulate yourself for being hip to Internet pop culture. In the meantime, don’t forget that you can now download combined color and black and white PDFs of all of my 2014 dolls and outfits for free! Also follow me on Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest for sneak previews, paperdoll thoughts and drawing tutorials I think might be useful. If you enjoy my work, I’d also appreciate your support through Patreon.

Halloween ‘10 Day 3: The Twisted Queen’s Black, Green and Red Gown

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

Now this is more like it, isn’t it, for proper life as an evil queen? This is the kind of thing our sorceress from yesterday generally prefers, so you can see why her inexplicable attachment to yesterday’s dress embarrasses her. (Well, it’s inexplicable to her: I know for a fact that her sister loved shiny ribbons and that particular neckline. But she doesn’t remember her sister anymore.)

She abandoned her flowery princess name shortly after awakening her powers, and she went by quite a few others over the years, but mostly she was called the Twisted Queen, even during the times she wasn’t really ruling much of anything. She liked that nickname, and although she made a point of removing the lips of anyone stupid enough to use it in front of her, she would reflect it in her gowns, her crown, her banner and so on. For it amused her to force the world to find patterns of entrails, of snakes, of ropes in the very hems of her skirts, and to cause every soul who saw her to recall her forbidden nickname.

She wore this gown to a summit held in a distant empire, but in truth she could have gone wearing a clown suit and it wouldn’t have harmed her reputation one bit, for things went wrong — as they so often do around her, on her most unstable days — and she was the only one to survive the meeting. But it’s a shame for no one to appreciate this dress, so she is graciously letting me share it with all of you. You may not actually appreciate it, and even for me, it is just a little too creepy to like… but if I was you I would at least nod and smile.

If you have been following me for a while, you might be wondering if the Twisted Queen was acquainted with the Good Queen. I wonder myself, come to think of it.

Prismacolors used: Black, French Grey 10%, 50%, 70%, 90%, Olive Green, Chartreuse, Yellow Chartreuse, Limepeel, Scarlet Lake, Sunburst Yellow, colorless blender. To be fair, French Grey was the entirely wrong color to use for the armband, and the color was corrected to be more similar to the crown in Photoshop.