It occurs to me that I’ve never shared any of Chasemore’s original art throughout the Judy series and I wanted to take a moment to recognize that in some small way. My renditions of the costumes are pretty accurate, but nowhere near as charming, and to see the costumes in context of the pages on which they appeared may give you some idea of the artist’s sense of marginalia-like whimsy.
Apologies that the pictures are on the small side. I wanted to make sure to include the whole page so you could get a sense of the layout, etc.
This first image shows the “Holiday Time” costume from Volume 25, which I just posted on Tuesday. “Holiday Time” is actually the name of a poem for which Chasemore has drawn this collage of characters. You can see I omitted details like the walking stick and fan (I often skip the fans ~ so many fans!). The face and silhouette is typical of Chasemore’s regular fashion series, which you can see in the next image, of the “Bird of Passage” bathing suit.
This is the typical layout of the page on which the fashions usual appear toward the back of the periodical. On this page each week, there’s usually an editorial “Our Weekly One”, sometimes overflow text from a story, and often some other collection of vignettes and humorous drawings, one of which is the “Fashion of the Week”. The series began as a doodle off in the corners of the page (clearly as filler), but you can see by Vol. 25, the feature had gained prominence. This particular page shows an unusually large image compared to others in the same volume, but this scale is to become the norm within the next few years, as “Fashion of the Week” assumed the focal point of the page in terms of the art. It clearly must have appealed to the readers of Judy.
I know I’ve said it before, but this really is a fun set to draw. Chasemore’s linework makes it so easy to replicate and he does such great easy things with very basic textures and frills. I’ve learned a lot about the power of suggestion with well-placed lines. I wish my Judy dolls had appropriately delicate feet as his models do; I drew them too big and never corrected them.
I’ll try now and then to share more resource images from this series because Chasemore deserves credit and they are pretty cool to look at. Also, it would be fun to share some of the designs I don’t pick to reproduce for the paper dolls, just so you can see some of the artist’s other stuff.
