The Making of a Fairy Queen

I've been working on a new Fairy Fold-Out Playset which will be similar to this project I worked on last year:

I've commissioned illustrator, Amy Saidens to create the art for the project, and we've been working on pulling together all the illustrations and characters. The project includes three fold-out scenes, and many fairy paper dolls and clothes to dress them up. One of the characters we asked her to create was a Fairy Queen. 

The first fairy she sent looked like this:

Too young I thought...too trendy. I asked Amy to try again, so she changed the fairy's hair to brown.

Hmmm, still not right. Too young, too much like the other fairies in the book. Too trendy. This fairy needs to look older, and more classic. Time to give a visual of what I'm looking for. So, I grabbed a Hollywood glam hair-do off the web, and added it to Amy's illustration in Photoshop. I also curved her figure a bit, and changed the leotard to a form-fitting dress. I suggested adding a little gray/white streaks to the fairy's hair as well.

Then, Amy reminded me that if she did this, the Fairy Queen's glam hair would be covered once the clothes were added, so she came up with this...

Perfect! Now we have a Fairy Queen! One of the trickiest things about creating a paper doll book like this, is ensuring that all the clothes will fit each doll properly, and be able to be attached in such a way that they don't fall off the doll once the user puts them on. (How frustrating is THAT...to have your paper doll's clothes fall off!?!?!). This is easier to check, and alter if necessary when the art is created digitally, but for a few of the projects like this I've worked on, the art has been created by hand w/ watercolors. Not only is the intricacy of the art difficult to reproduce, but if the clothes don't fit exactly right, I end up having to clone them in Photoshop which is absolutely beastly! The Princess project above was one such project, although, in the end, I think the results are really cute! Hopefully some little girl out there will think so too!