A post with which Leslie tries to answer the question, “What the what?”
Steph and I were kicking around ideas for a textile design collection. Naturally, we had been leaning toward designs inspired by penny arcades (see our origin story), but we had not fully developed that idea, when, on a plane headed to Boston I gazed at the cover of the cheezy pirate romance novel that I was reading and thought, “Man, that is a bad book cover…” The only thing that would have made it worse would be if I had drawn it. I am, you see, really bad at drawing.
It’s not for lack of education; it is has been purely a lack of practice and perseverance. I am occasionally hit with the whim to improve upon my skills, buy another sketchbook with visions of paging through a collection of beautiful work someday, paint some godawful thing, and abandon it on page two. I present as evidence, “Baby gets first haircut” below.
A few days later, at the first official working meeting of Princess Doraldina Designs, I recounted the book cover story. Stephanie immediately picked up on it, and we sat down to try and see just how bad our paintings could be. On that day, a collection was born.
Recreating gestures of some iconic romance novel book covers, we had a ball. Steph was able to capture what appears to be the gist of every romance novel cover in this one painting:
She wants him but she doesn't. Or does she? Oh, she does.
While I concentrated on muscles and facial hair:
Pirates are muscular and always in the wind
Stephanie realized that she has been drawing feet the same way since she was nine:
Shoes and feet are optional
While I abandoned all art school training, especially when it comes to drawing hands...and what is that, a flank?
Draw what you know, not what you see
We ended the day on a high note with this masterpiece, painted by Stephanie. There is so much wrong with this picture, we don't know where to start.
At the end of this working session, we had definitely developed some kind of style, and realized that by painting and outlining our characters and leaving them on a plain white background, we would have most flexibility to use them for our designs. Stay tuned.