Month: February 2017

Judy : Vol. 31, 1882 Plate 7

Today’s Judy Tuesday theme is…skinny skirts that can fit facing one another on the page with room to spare?  Also, big ridiculous hats.

This is officially the most number of plates I have made for a Judy volume. Usually I only make 6 at most. This set will have eight. And there were still two plates worth of costumes that I just decided not to render. We’ll see how future volumes yield.

One final Judy post next week and then there might be a break in Judy for a spell since I haven’t even started on Volume 32. Peeking ahead it looks like the costumes in the next volume are a little less fanciful overall–but lovely all the same.

Don’t know if that means I’ll drag my heels with the drawing–or maybe I will get really ambitious and plow right on through to the next one in a mad rush.

It’s always a roulette spin here for me. Either way, you know I’ll always come back to Judy eventually.

[click this link or the image to download a printable .pdf of these costumes]

Catwalk Couture: 2017 Oscars [Plates 3 & 4]

My fashion paper dolls are so unfashionable!  They’re not wearing 2017 couture to the Oscars. I’m going to blame it on the fact that this is their first time going and none of them knew any better. Well, Niall should have, but he’s kind of prone to break the rules.

So Ifu is wearing a two year-old Chanel gown–but c’mon, it’s not like Chanel goes out of style! And Xia is wearing last year’s Valentino-esque fashion. The wrap and bolero for the women are completely my own designs. I needed something to fill out the plate and clutch purses seemed too chintzy.

For the men, I separated the Tom Ford tuxedo jackets from the pants because it’s easier to pair the slacks and tuxedo shirt with multiple jackets. And yes, there’s that tiger-striped jacket of Niall’s that I mentioned on the salvage post. But rather than repeatedly draw more tuxedo slacks, it seemed the sensible thing to do here. I mean, I probably will draw more tuxedos, but the slacks are really only differentiated by colors–the style is typically very similar. Especially if they are black.

I should also say that the reason Xia’s dress is described as “Valentino-inspired” is because I drew it before I was being methodical about my choices and the reference picture I used said it was Valentino, but then I couldn’t actually confirm that anywhere, so I have no idea.

I’m being much more careful going forward! Rather than doing random Google searches, I’m using a variety of fashion-specific sources for reference, particularly:

Vogue Fashion Shows: comprehensive runway site!
Farfetch.com: couture outlet!

I made a conscious decision to fill in as little of the blacks on these line art plates. First, because it’s a drag on your printers, but also because you can color stuff however you want. The lapels and cuffs on Lonan’s Tom Ford tux jacket are black, but maybe you want them to be neon orange. Have at it!

I’m still working out the best way to plate these dolls, so prepare for a few bumps along the way. I’m trying to avoid leaving the plates too empty or too crowded, but it’s hard to find a middle ground. For the women it’s not too bad, but the difference in physique on the men makes plating their clothes an interesting challenge.

I decided to throw everything into this post since it’s the kick-off and I might as well make it sorta special. I also just haven’t figured out the best way to post these plates. Sometimes the colors look kind of flat to me when you can’t see what they look like on the dolls. I’m not sure why I have this impression.

To find all plates related to a character or designer, use the tags!

[click on each picture to download a printable .pdf]


Geneviéve: At the Oscars

Sunday is Oscars night! What better excuse to dress to the nines? In addition to a formal red carpet gown, Geneviéve has a flirty after-party dress (she’ll have to borrow some shoes, though: oops!). If I was smarter, I would have made it so that you could layer the dresses. But that didn’t occur to me until too late. Yes, I was too lazy to fix it. Or squeeze in shoes.

These dresses and wrap are based on this look from Blumarine.

Find more theme outfits to match this doll at the following fabulous blogs:

This collaborative doll will be posted at the end of each month all throughout 2017 with a new theme each month.  To find all related posts on this blog, just click the “Geneviéve” tag.

[Click on this link or the picture to download a printable .pdf plate!]

Catwalk Couture: Salvage [Plates 2 & 3]

Despite the fact that I completely changed Niall’s pose, I was able to salvage more from the men than I did from the women. This is why Lonan and Niall each have a plate, whereas Ifu and Xia only had one to share. Also, I had fewer painting disasters with the men’s clothes. They just came out nicer overall.

I’ve been posting paper dolls online for at least five years, give or take. Anyone who’s followed me for even part of that time knows I have an incontrovertible bias toward men. This morning I was drawing gowns and found myself mentally wandering. I love beautiful dresses, but I just find men’s clothes more interesting to draw! Maybe it has to do with the fact that most men dress badly ~ ha!

Anyway. Originally everyone started out with a foundation of Burberry.

For the men, I chose Tom Ford next instead of Balmain. There are only a couple of pieces from the original set that I didn’t salvage, and all of the shoes for both the men and the women. I really liked the shoes and wanted to salvage them. But since I had no line art and space on the plates was at a premium, I decided to recycle them into the new plates later on.

Also worth noting is that I redrew Niall’s Tom Ford jacket for his Oscars tuxedo. I just really liked the style for him: he would so wear something that borderline tacky. I really had to work hard to salvage Niall’s stuff, but there were pieces–like those tiger shorts and that hat that I refused to let go. Lonan’s stuff made it over like Ifu’s–with minimum fuss.

It’s been so much fun to work on this series for this last month or so since I scrapped the first set of dolls. There’s no end to the resources to draw from and I feel like a kid in a candy shop. There are fashions from the last five years I’d love to get to, but just the new stuff coming out has been immensely consuming!

Once again, if you have a favorite designer, let me know because my tastes run pretty particular. I’m trying to branch out and pick unusual things to challenge myself. But Alexander McQueen, Balmain, Marchessa–I could stick with those three and be in hog heaven forever.

I’m still figuring out this series as I go. And learning to render lots of interesting patterns and textures!

Sunday: an outing at the Oscars!

[click on each image to download a printable .pdf]

Judy : Vol. 31, 1882 Plate 6

Clockwise we’re going backwards this Judy Tuesday, but the designs seem apropos for an unseasonably warm February. Since it feels like spring outside, here are some spring-themed outfits to enjoy!

I’m not sure I did Chasemore’s Butterfly costume justice. But I do like the way the headpiece came out with the little butterfly earring. The headpiece with the grapes also had a leaf earring, but for some reason I didn’t draw it.

I work on Judy when I’m too tired to do anything else. That means I can sometimes be sloppy about it. In this case I was overall kind of lazy about the September costume grape dress–I’m frankly amazed I managed to finish it! There were four additional outfits I originally selected from this volume that I ultimately weeded out. They had their charms, but somehow seemed more effort than they were worth to actually render. I always try to pick only the best for my readers!

So there are two more plates for this volume of Judy and I promise we’re going to end with a great big bang!

[click this link or the image to download a printable .pdf of these costumes]

 

Star Wars Paper Dolls: Rey No. 1

Rey is our first principal female hero in a Star Wars movie. I like her a lot and I wasn’t expecting to. Usually media overdoes it when it comes to female heroes. They’re too counter-culture, too dispassionate, too “badass” to be interesting. Just cardboard cutouts of their male counterparts. Men in skirts–which is not the ideal female hero to me.

But Rey isn’t any of those things. She’s sweet, she’s fiesty, yes, but also uncertain; a fighter whose heart is more important than whatever weapon she lays her hands on. And yes, even that weapon.

And she’s the perfect foil for Kylo Ren. They are yin/yan in this fantasy, which makes her not only interesting on a personal level, but a cosmic one as well.

I’m very excited to see where her journey takes her. And if you are even remotely wondering, no, I am not the least bit interested in who her parents are. She is perfectly interesting all by herself.

This first set of plates is the costume she appears in throughout most of the film. It includes her fighting staff with which she wards off trouble on Jakku. I have another plate for Rey that’s not finished yet, which has her Resistance outfit from the end of the movie. On that plate I will also include Anakin’s infamous light saber, which Rey uses to defeat Kylo Ren and presents to Luke on Ahch-To.

I really love most of the costume work in The Force Awakens. Rey’s long sash and her banded arms are especially appealing. I also love the way she fashioned goggles from an old stormtrooper visor.

These plates are dated from 2016. I made them a year ago last spring and never got around to posting them. I planned to do a whole set of Force Awakens dolls, but only got around to making Rey and Kylo Ren. In the fall I had a request for a General Hux, and then just after Christmas I added General Leia for too-sad reasons.

I thought I should at least finish posting the characters that I completed. I’d still like to make at least plates for Luke and Han since it would just be a matter of making costumes and heads for the available bodies. We’ll see what I get up to.

Next Friday I’ll post Kylo Ren.

[click on each image to download a printable .pdf copy of each plate]

 

Judy : Vol. 31, 1882 Plate 5

I know it’s still winter, but we’re ready for the beach this Judy Tuesday!

I think my favorite thing on these two designs is the crustacean on top of the shell hat.

These were particularly fun to draw! Definitely representative of Chasemore’s more fanciful designs. He’s done a lot of beach themes in the past, but most of those were actual beach wear. These are fun because the dresses echo the beach itself.

The holidays always seem to sneak up on me. Then I think: aw gee, I should have done something for Valentine’s Day. One of these days I’ll work out a calendar. Or not. Maybe the Judys are meeting their sweethearts on the beach. How about that?

I have three more plates for Volume 31 of Judy (a couple of costumes which are quite outrageous). Then I might take a brief hiatus since I haven’t done any of the preparatory work for the next volume. Maybe that will have changed three weeks from now.

[click this link or the image to download a printable .pdf of these costumes]

Catwalk Couture: Meet Lonan and Niall

Like our women, the menfolk come from very diverse backgrounds.

Lonan is a twenty-eight year-old high school dropout who was “discovered” at a truckstop in Tonopah, Arizona. He was hitchhiking to the West Coast hoping to get work doing set construction for a movie studio. Now he lives in New York, which he prefers to the desert. He has adapted to modeling and enjoys his job, even though he sometimes struggles with certain aspects of the fashion world.

Lonan has a reserved personality, likes swimming, winter sports, horses, and historical dramas. He’s rather smitten with Ifu, but hasn’t screwed up enough courage to ask her out. He has a dog and does charity work for a local shelter. Lonan’s ancestry is nearly pureblood Zuni and his name means cloud–of course.

Niall is the son of a well-known documentary producer and equally famous photographer. He’s twenty-three years old and quite spoiled. Bored studying design in college, he never finished his degree. He’s a bit of an exhibitionist and flaunts his bisexuality, modeling for the thrill of it. Despite all that, he’s not a hedonist. He has always tempered his joie de vivre to avoid causing scandal for his doting parents.

Niall enjoys big noisy blockbusters, musical theatre, and the club scene. But he has good taste in art, music, and cuisine, and enjoys refinement. He loves to travel to exotic places and meet new people. His name is Gaelic, and, like all of the other models, it also means cloud.

Lonan and Niall work well together despite friction due to their different personalities. Or perhaps because of it. Niall constantly needles Lonan for his shyness.

As with the women, when I designed these two, I wanted them to be very different physically and temperamentally. When I look at designer collections I think about what each would choose for themselves. It makes it easier to pick styles that suit them, and to ensure I am considering a variety, rather than selecting items I personally find attractive. Much of Niall’s wardrobe consists of things I don’t especially like–ha!

Also, though I wanted to make Lonan Native American from the outset, I was less certain of Niall’s ancestry at first. I didn’t mean to make him Irish. But I have a friend who is very enamored of Domhnall Gleeson, so I was unduly influenced after being compelled to watch his Burberry commercial.

[click on the pictures to download the plates]

 

Fear the Walking Dead: Madison & Travis

We interrupt our scheduled Force Friday to bring you a special request! I don’t typically do requests because my tastes are particular. Often things other people find interesting aren’t of any special interest to me. However, when I say I’m going to do a set of dolls and then don’t do them–and then a reader very kindly asks me if I ever will? Well, then I feel like I should.

Especially when it’s a simple matter of scanning and plating up stuff that’s been sitting around since 2015 (eek!). I could have posted these a lot sooner, but I had to dig them up, I had to ink Madison’s clothes, paint both Madison’s and Travis’ wardrobes, scan them, plate them, pdf them, and get them uploaded. And I’m a slow and lazy creature.

But here they are! Special just for Amy @TV_Teenager. In truth, I made their entire Season One wardrobes, but I just don’t have the time to paint all that. So here’s the dolls and some starter pieces, and for people who want to play with them, they can fill in the gaps.

Fear the Walking Dead has its moments as a show, but first half of the second season really kind of turned me off, which is why this set perished on the vine. They killed a bunch of characters I liked, and I’m frustrated with its Walking Dead-style nightmare wind-chiming pacing. There’s also entirely too much idiotic character decision-making. Perhaps the Season Two finale’s death ought to bring that under control (along with the too-much whining).

Madison and Travis are still cool though. So here they are!

[As always, click each image to download a printable .pdf!]