9 Ladies Dancing

There are different interpretations of this song, as I have noted earlier, and I am sure that one of them at least has 9 drummers drumming. So I spent a fair amount of time today drawing drummers, then thought, wait a minute, that doesn't seem right. No, it is ladies dancing that is the more common version of this verse. Well, at least part of my motivation for doing this was to challenge myself to draw something every day. Since I already drew drummers, I figured I could move on to another art form.

I happen to like paper dolls, and especially paper doll chains, so I didn't mind starting over again. These dolls are 3.5 inches high and about 2 inches wide, so I cut a 3.5-inch strip from a sheet of 8.5 by 11-inch paper, allowing a half inch at either end to round off the hand of the first and last doll -- each strip made 5 dolls. I cut off the 10th one and used the poor thing as my guinea pig for drawing the face and such. I was going to paste them together to make one 9-dancing-doll chain, but decided it would be easier to photograph them in this arrangement.

Now that I have made this set, I am eager to modify the basic design. It's really rather fun. If I can figure out how to do it, I will make a template into a PDF to share. (Don't hold your breath! You might prefer to just figure it out yourself anyway.) If I made the face looking forward, instead of in profile, I could use rubber stamps of facial features, which would look rather cool, don't you think? The dolls would probably have to be a little bigger to be in proportion to the stamps, though.

After cutting them out, I decorated them with Sharpie pens, rubber stamps, and little plastic flowers.

Now is it 10 lords leaping or pipers piping next?