Lolita Fashion #26: Autumn Academy

Dear Celine's Autumn Academy

Okay. I admit I wasn't very clever with the title. The title is just the name of the dress. I guess the idea is that it's supposed to be a classy look for heading back to school. Kind of a preppy Lolita look.

I like Dear Celine's style for these dresses. It's very classy, cute, and simple looking and it's not the first time I've drawn it for Kamiko. Here's a few other giant images of Dear Celine's clothing on K:

This one is actually a sister design to this dress. The skirt even showed up as the very first Lolita Turntable look. It's the one I keep calling "Dear Kamiko."

If I had a "dream dress," this would probably be it. It's definitely a candidate to use when I go to draw future stories of This Mortal Coil. I love the ruffles and lace, but it's a pain in the butt to texture.

Progression

It may lack ruffles, but it certainly doesn't lack pinstripes. To make the pinstripe pattern I created a ribbon brush using Manga Studio's brush maker. First, I made a simple material using a white-red-white stripe pattern. I created an ink brush so I could freehand texture the cuffs and sleeves. I used the mesh transform to cover the rest of the dress and tried to follow the pattern as closely as I could to the original design.

If you want to learn how to make brushes in Manga Studio/Clip Paint Studio, check out my blog post on it.

Replicating this dress in this view of Kamiko gave me a lot of trouble.

For a first, there's actually no sketch beyond the rough one I did of her figure. I went straight from the rough outline to inking it -- my first attempt at doing that, and maybe a sketch would have helped me solve these issues without doing the inking at the same time. When I finished my first go at it, I could see a lot of weird issues. Her midsection looked too long and slender. The proportions of the dress were all wrong despite getting all the elements in. To fix it, I shortened the dress, flaired it out further, re-spaced the double-breasted buttons and lowered her collar.

Another issue is that her left arm hides a side of her body, and I think this makes her look too skinny. To augment this I made the dress bloom out higher up on her and curve up behind that arm to give it more thickness. I think all these changes helped to make Kamiko and the dress look in proportion correctly.

I also think this begins to show some of the weaknesses in my 3D mannequin that I use as the trace over. It's too skinny and the proportions don't seem right. When I made it, they did seem right, but that's no longer the case. Time to make a new one, but it's served me well for all these years.

Inspiration

Here's the original design. I think you can still buy this dress.

Turntable

This video includes Lolita styles 1-14, 26-30. We're working our way around and closing the gap.

#lolitafashion 1-14, 26-30 turntable #animation #video ...So what's next? pic.twitter.com/Ya3kOgB4ej

— GlennAllen Mixon says Merry Christmas! (@AlbinoGrimby) May 19, 2016

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