wedding

Liz Patterson’s Final Wedding Dress with Teal and Lavender Roses from For Better or For Worse

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Since my 1940s wedding dress attached to a rant on For Better or For Worse is one of the more popular dresses on the blog, I feel like I should bring the saga to a close. Dee ended up altering the supposedly sixty-something-year old dress into something reasonably modern, the Ghost of Grandma made up for fanciful logic on the part of the cartoonist, the flowers were hideous and Liz ended up marrying that creep. All the way up until the vows were said I was hoping Liz would come to her senses, but immediately after that scene I was so over the whole thing, as evidenced by my putting off the dress for four months. If the end of the saga was boring its weird rebirth is mind-numbingly dreary, although sometimes I visit the Foobiverse!’s Journal out of nostalgia and their second-hand psychoanalysis of Lynn is amusing at times. I still follow Foob’s Paradise, though, which is a webcomic that continues the Pattersons’ adult lives.

Since I get so many search queries related to weddings, I’m thinking of doing some sort of “wedding week” perhaps, maybe after Christmas. If you have any pictures of wedding dresses you just love, feel free to post links in the comments so I can get inspired!

The Good Queen is so far holding her own over the other dead queen and the rest of her competitors. She would say that’s only the way things should be, but it’s not over yet. I will do a bonus costume or two for whoever wins, so if you adore one of them get your vote in, send your friends over, post to your weblog and beg your readers to vote for your favorite!

poll by twiigs.com

Mermaid Monday #4: Bride Mermaid in Red Tattered Wedding Dress with Iridescent Blue and Purple Tail

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My poll was a success! Thanks, everyone who voted. While black had a strong showing near the end, iridescent won the day, rather to my chagrin as I haven’t really drawn anything iridescent before… I think it worked out reasonably well, though not perfectly. I based the iridescent part on one of the pearls in this picture.

Mermaids associate the colors pink and red most strongly with weddings and brides, possibly due to red seaweed being a traditional bridal decoration. Pink has a rather old-fashioned feel and deep reds display the family’s wealth, because the deeper the color is, the harder it is to waterproof successfully, and so dark or rich colors weren’t available until more recently and they’re more expensive. These days, mermaid brides tend to choose a shade between pale pink and blood red that they think best suits their tail. (This means that mermaid bridesmaids grumble more than human ones if the bride insists on their wearing the same color; the green-tailed mermaid does not like the poppy red that sets off the bride’s black tail so well, and the mermaid with the light yellow tail feels washed out in the pale pink favored by the silver-tailed bride.) Pearls are also traditional wedding decorations, and a moderately priced rope of white pearls serves much the same function at a mermaid wedding as a toaster does at a wedding for American humans. Different-colored pearls, particularly black and rose ones, are most valued. Red seaweed is, of course, very popular, although seaweed of every type might be used much as humans might use flowers. Depending on where a mermaid lives and on the fashions, other flowers are popular; water lilies are often used in some areas, and tropical flowers such as hibiscus might be more popular in others. Not all mermaid wedding dresses are tattered, but it’s as hard for mermaid designers to resist as lace is for human ones, because of the strong romantic overtones.

For the veil, you will want to cut a straight line between the bottom of the crown, underneath the seaweed, and the veil. This way the doll’s head can be poked through.

New poll for this week:

more at twiigs.com…

1940s wedding dress (because I’m bitter about Liz Patterson)

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So, I follow For Better or for Worse, even though my husband says “If you don’t like it, why do you read it?” And I don’t know why. I don’t like Anthony. I don’t really like Liz all that much anymore. And when, in a piece of hamfisted foreshadowing, Dee found a boxed 1940s wedding dress found behind a rock in a crawlspace, I didn’t really like that either, especially because it was obvious it would clean up as good as new and that it would fit Liz perfectly. But what the heck, I can suspend emotion and reason to appreciate a good dress, and even if I, like srah, would just as soon see Liz run off at the altar, I can deal with seeing her married there if she is wearing a half-decent gown. And then we saw what that moldy old dress looked like.

I don’t like it. Just look at it, no way it’s a 1940s dress, not with the combination of the neckline and the transparent sleeves. That looks like 1970s to me. See, look at this 1975 pattern illustration. That middle dress looks just like it, with shorter sleeves. (And frankly, if her bridesmaids wore those middle dresses, that would redeem the WHOLE strip for me.) I don’t think it’s really flattering on her, either, I don’t like those sleeves or that huge bustle.

And as I was looking at 1940s and 1970s wedding dresses, I got even more disappointed that hers wasn’t a 1940s dress, and how much fun that would have been to draw, and so I thought, well, I’ll draw one anyways! I based it off of this pattern (and the crown off of this one) and actually, I chose it because I think it would have looked good on Liz — I think the neckline would have suited the way she wears her hair when it’s down, and I think its relative plainness and sleekness suit her better than the heavily beaded and gauzy dress she got. I don’t think she seems to be a very frou-frouy kind of person: she dresses pretty plainly, usually, and doesn’t seem to have a high-maintenance style, so I think that this design works as long as she has her hair down, to offset the straight lines of the dress. I actually did a sketch of her in this dress. I think it works on her pretty well, although if she was actually going out and buying a dress, it probably wouldn’t be this one. But then again, it wouldn’t be the one she got either.

And actually, some of those 1970s dresses are completely awesome, in a half-ironic half-awestruck way. I mean, even if they look dated and a little goofy, I still love the romantic style and ruffles more than I like everything being strapless and sleek these days. Just try and tell me this gal’s wedding wouldn’t have been an absolute delight.. And I rather like this one far on the right, with modified sleeves… and I totally feel like I shouldn’t love the middle one here but I do. I guess I could get behind Liz’s dress if it was her mom’s dress, but 1940s, yeah right.

Princess Ashe’s Wedding Dress from Final Fantasy XII

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So I started playing Final Fantasy XII again recently. (It works nicely with my job. For my fifteen minute breaks, I do dishes and pick up, and on my half-hour break I go beat up some skeletons.) I think the thing I love most about the game is the lushly textured world design… everything is just so pretty. Funny, then, that I don’t really like the character designs for the main characters, except Fran and Balthier. (Don’t get me started on Penelo’s weird leather wings … or Ashe’s little sailor collar… or Vaan the most well-dressed orphaned urchin ever … or Basch’s potholder) I was thinking that I should paperdoll the NPCs, because each major area has its own style, and the female townspeople always looked really cool to me, especially the Arcades women. Luckily, I found a great Ashe shrine that has screen captures of the dress, plus the original concept art, which meant I got to abandon my half-hearted sketch of her regular costume and go for this one instead!

This is Ashe’s wedding dress, and you see it in the very first part of the game, followed soon after by her mourning dress. If I didn’t do the wedding dress, I’d have done a white dress she wears that I also liked, which as it turns out is just a white and grey version of her mourning dress. Maybe another day…

Scanner messed this one up too, but I fixed it up well enough. Does anyone have any idea why it does that? It scans intially sort of softer and the colors are true to the page, then when the scan or preview is done, the colors get more saturated and it looks kind of like someone ran a sharpen filter on the whole thing…