Identity Crisis

I was almost decided on a boy for Phoenix's gender but now I'm not that sure anymore. This doll would make a lovely cute girl as well. Well it's a girl mold dah! I dressed Phoenix like this for Tracon, since I wanted a frilly doll to suit my outfit, an SD since they are easier to carry (they fit nicely into the crook of the arm, although they are heavy) and didn't want to risk Eiko or Yuffie since they are the most expensive ones... And I fell in love with this look =_= I have such a weakness for frilly dolls...



So now I'm thinking that maybe Phoenix would be a girl after all. She'd be mostly very tomboy, maybe identify as a boy. The identify as a boy part I'm quite unsure of, since I have no idea about that world and I might be insensitive about it without knowing. Maybe a tomboy-girl with an affinity for frills would be the best way to go then. It's not like many are going to be thinking that much about it anyway :D They'll just see a Kun sometimes dressing boyish, sometimes girlish :D

In the end I would love to get a real lolita look for one of my dolls... There just doesn't seem to be that many choices around, at least for simple cute sweet lolita. I know that the accessories are a pain to make in this size as well as finding cute prints (which is the cornerstone of sweet for me). AP has done outfits for Blythes/Pullips (I get those mixed all the time), and maybe they won't do BJD since Volks already has a collaboration with Baby. And those Baby outfits are a bit too much frill to my taste. Dollheart makes loliable things, but usually they look a bit too costumy and still misses the prints.

I could try to make my own, but as I said, it's a pain! And I have this desire to make it "real lolita" if I make it. Or I can only call it 'cute' or 'frills' if it doesn't match the lolita guidelines. That actually goes for both the dolls and myself :D Unless I'd be wearing a proper blouse, a jsk/skirt of the right lenght and puffness and correct shoes, I'm not going to call myself a lolita. But despite my Guess heels, and my about-10cm-too-short-jsk I seemed to be lolita enough for others, as I got a tug and a promo flyer for the Hellocon 2014 from one of the orginisers of that lolita convention. Or it might be so that they could educate me about proper lolita there :D But I doubt it, she was really sweet. And I do take care about my underskirt and overall coordination, something I feel I've improved on a lot (but I'm still not as good as Valentine...), and try look to look my best. I wear the style my own way, how it suits me best.

I just hope that some other lolis I noticed at Tracon don't use this same reasoning, while the end result just doesn't look either lolita neither good (the latter can of course be said of me as well, beauty is debateable, but I think I can still separate myself from these with the next reasons). There were actually surprisingly many people there (as in as many as people I could really call lolis) who wore too long a-line tulle underskirts under their jsks. Now a-line (opposed to the traditional loli cupcake) I could accept for the same reason I accept my own heels, for some people it just looks better. But it doesn't look good that there's some 10-15cm of plain tulle showing from under it! If the underskirt is too long for your dress, for Fyrd's sake roll it up or pin it! It'll look infinitely better and would draw the eye to your pretty skirt instead of the tulle. Also, some would might want to think twice what to wear under a jsk. Again, I'm more to the lenient side, I don't frown at people wearing jsks without a blouse, especially on a hot, sunny day. But if you're going to dismiss the blouse/cutsew, then at least think about what kind of a bra you're wearing. If the backside shows the cross-straps of a sports bra under a sweet pink jsk, it's not going to look good. Especially if your jsk is pink and your bra is grey.

Well enough rant, now for something positive. Or less negative :) Want to know how I took that above picture of Phoenix? I'm going to anyway :D

Photographywise, I took inspiration from another doll-photographer (Hae-ri on Flickr) who used this same trick with backlighting. Basically I taped a white A4 to the window, stuck the doll in front of it and used a very diffused flash. I don't think the original used flash as her photos look more soft, but I couldn't get the best result otherwise. I'll have to try this again with more direct sunlight and some reflectors...

And then I did some post-processing, you can see the original here and then some of my comments:

After basic cropping, resizing, unsharpmasking and highlighting the irises with dodge-tool, I used my usual dream-blur effect that I often fall back on whith very light-coloured pictures. I duplicate the layer, set it to soft light and then use gaussian blur enough to make the photo come out all dreamy. Then I set the opacity to my liking (depending on how stark I want the shadows to be).

Then comes the light. I make a greyscale gradient fill layer (that looks like B&W version of the photo) and set it to screen. It first blows everything white, but then I adjust the opacity to make it as light as I want it to be. Then I fine-tune the lights with levels, usually dragging the midtones slightly to the right, deepening the shadows a bit. Here I also made the highlights a bit more white, dragging the whites slightly to the left.

For colours, I use the colour balance sliders. Here I mostly tweaked the magenta-cyan slider to favour cyan with both midtones and highlights. I also added a bit more magenta. Then for the shadows I enrichened the reds and yellows a bit. I usually do this, where I move the slider one way for midtones+highlights, and then to the other direction for the shadows :D

For this photo, I also lowered the saturation a bit, since I wanted it to be more about the lightness, and not so much of the colours. And just load it to your photo site of choice (I still prefer Flickr myself) and you're done!