In the middle of a normal PM conversation I was asked the careless question "what kind of outfits do you like to draw for dress ups?". Asking me anything about dress ups tends to launch an unnecessarily long and elaborate response, which this time resulted in a deep pondering about the philosophy of drawing dress ups as a hobby when the subject strayed further away from the original topic. That, in turn, prompted me to write even more about them.

I became acquainted with paper dolls at a very young age, because my cousin had loads of them. I was even inspired to draw some on my own as well, though they paled in comparison to those my cousin made for me (but she is nine years older so that's not exactly a surprise). Then in my middle school years I joined DeviantArt and found the wonders of flash dress ups; I used to have quite a wide knowledge on the Dress up repertory of dA, and at some point I started dreaming of making one myself. At that time I was a huge One Piece fan (I still am), and while I have never had any interest towards clothes in real life I was determined to make a Nami dress up with all her outfits. Deep down I'm a collector, and for some reason I wanted to "collect" all her outfits I could find during my adventures through the Internet. Just storing the pictures on my computer seemed insufficient, and drawing normal pictures of them felt plain stupid. An interactive "game" with them, on the other hand, provided an option to actually do something with my awesome collection. And ever since the times of the first Nami dress up I've always had the same obsessive pack rat attitude towards drawing all the possible outfits by the character in the same game as well as narrowing my subject down pretty tight, strictly excluding everything that didn't fit the theme.

The ideas for the games generally come from the stuff I watch and read. Every time I'm watching a movie or reading a manga my mind is always subconsciously thinking "would this make a good dress up?". The general idea is that if an important character (one I don't hate) has many distinct and memorable outfits, or if the general style of the clothes in the whole work is uniform enough to give material for a solid character creator my dress up senses start to tingle. Unfortunately many fabulous ideas get buried under other stuff and I lose interest in the subject during the time they wait in the dress up to-do list, because I almost always have one or more games under production. I try not to start too many games at the same time, because that leads to half-finished games being left hanging for a long period of time until I decide that I don't want to work on the outdated art any more, which means that what could have been a nice dress up ends up in the graveyard of dress ups, the dreaded Flash dumps.

Returning to the original question. What kind of outfits do I like to draw then? I'd say they are in the middle ground of the difficulty line. Simple clothes are fast to draw and usually require very little effort, but there's nothing fun about drawing them either. Recolours of the same item are extremely boring, but my plan is to draw all the outfits the character has I have no choice but to draw the recolours too. The outfits with minimal, barely visible alterations in the lineart, on the other hand, are absolutely worst. An average visitor wouldn't pay any attention to them, and having extremely similar outfits crowd the clothing pages probably lower the quality of the game overall (I'm looking at you and your 10+ nun uniforms, Esther), but I can't get over my own stupid rules.

Complex items, on the other hand, can take a long time to draw, which in itself is both frustrating and fun (in some extremely twisted way). Every time a dress in a Trinity Blood dress up takes an hour to draw I'm cursing to myself how time consuming it is and how stupid I am for starting the project in the first place, but every time a new dress appears I rejoice the fact that I'll... get to spend two hours drawing it. Also, when it comes to elaborate outfits I have a bad habit of trying to draw every single detail from the reference picture, which leads to the outfit becoming very messy and cluttered. For overall quality it would be a lot better if I admitted to myself that sometimes less is more and didn't try to compress everything in, but I can't help it, I just HAVE to draw the clothes as close to the reference as possible. Only in a seriously critical lack of space when it is simply physically impossible to include any more lines to the outfit I am willing to settle for a less detailed option.

Complex outfits do have the advantage to simple ones that if there's a ton of detail it might hide mistakes of larger scale. I think I once read that the Ghibli director Goro Miyazaki had said on his movie "Tales of the Earthsea" that at first he thought giving the characters very simple outfits would be an easy solution, but later learnt that then all the mistakes would show a lot better. I, too, feel this way; if I have to draw a flowy hem on a dress I really hope I can decorate it with random detail so that my lack of fold drawing skills is less apparent than what it really is.

Items with two parts (like a coat and its back part) aren't exactly fun either, the back part tends to be annoying to make. Usually the back part is very simple so it's not as if it took considerable amount of time, but it's still irritating. Nowadays I've learned to loop the code so that I only have to give the back part a correct name in the coding, so at least I don't need to copypaste the same "move back part at the same time with front part" code to every piece. The new code doesn't work on three-part items though, so they are completely out of question unless it's absolutely necessary due to the fact that I'd have to write a new annoying code for them. So far the only three-part item I've drawn is one of the dresses in the Seth dress up. Probably the most frustrating thing is when I have to design most of the outfit myself though. I don't feel comfortable with designing and it's very rare that I was content with what I could create.

The Trinity Blood dress up series is my pride and joy, and at the same time I feel that it'll be the one to cause the most wangst. I have already dress-upped 8 of the planned 12 characters. What'll happen when my collection is complete? In the series "Moomin" a philatelist Hemulen manages to collect every stamp out there, and he's not exactly happy about it. Another character comments that "Hemulen is no longer a collector. He has become a mere owner, and that is not nearly as much fun." That is probably what will happen to me too... I guess I'll deal with it by dress-upping characters I don't care that much? The owner-collector problem is evident with the clothes in the TB games as well; it is my purpose in life (?) to collect all the characters' outfits, and once I'm done there is nothing to add to the game. That's why I'm extremely overjoyed when a new outfit appears for some character.

Character sheets as reference offers one new philosophical aspect to the making of dress ups. I love character sheets; I hoard sheets of series I don't even know, I draw characters just standing against a white background (laziness has something to do with this too though...), I print out character sheets for drawing reference, and often merely good quality character sheets try to lure me into making a dress up of a series I don't care about (Black Butler hooooo). Character sheets offer a great reference: you can see the whole outfit, and often the character is already in a similar pose as the doll in the dress up.

But character sheets have an interesting problem: they're too easy. In my long and glorious dress up making history I've learned to use all kinds of low quality reference pictures, like a tiny and blurry cam pic of a super exclusive drawing that is only available in an art gallery in Japan, a two-page colourspread where only the collar of the outfit is visible so that I have to design almost everything myself, or screen-capping low quality Youtube videos every two seconds. There haven't even been many character sheets for the subjects of my dress ups, so finding one has always provided an awesome change from the bad pictures. But when I recently drew clothes from a series that had huge character sheets for all the outfits something was missing, everything was just way too easy and a lot of value was lost when no effort was required. Struggling with horribly blurry Youtube videos has its own weird magic.

I've seen someone comment that dress ups shouldn't be called "games", because, well, they really aren't games. I kind of agree; it's not like you can "win" somehow, or that it requires any effort from the "player". But I still keep calling them games occasionally, because that's shorter than "dress ups", and sometimes a longer text on the subject needs variation with the words. Also in Finnish there isn't a good word for an online dress up, so I tend to use the word for game to avoid any elaborate explanations on "virtual paper doll".

As I said previously, earlier I was pretty eager to play dress ups, and searched the flash interactive section almost weekly for new ones. Nowadays... I hardly play them at all; I find making dress ups and character creators extremely fun, while playing with them doesn't really interest me any more. Maybe one reason to that is that I've set so stupidly high standards for myself when making them that simpler games don't interest me that much, and there aren't many people who'd be interested in investing similar amounts of time as I do to making a dress up game. As for my own games, I don't really touch them after I'm done with them. Usually if a game takes longer than a few days to make I tend to be totally fed up with it towards the end, because an ongoing game process prevents me from jumping to new ideas, so when it's finally finished I don't want to see the whole thing any more. This means that when I check an older game after a while I'm usually very surprised, often because my feelings tend to be "uhh, back when I made this I thought the art was good. What was I thinking, it's not that good at all!"

As it might be evident from the fact that I've already finished almost 40 dress ups and there's still more to come, I really enjoy making them. However, why I enjoy it in the first place very mysterious to me. I don't care for clothes (I could wear the same thing until it wears through if social norms didn't prevent it, and I hate fashion), sketching the doll isn't all that interesting, drawing the doll lineart is one of my least favourite things, drawing the clothes can cause all kinds of frustration as explained above, coding is either boring repeating of what I already know or struggling with new algorithms that take lots of time to work and it takes many games to perfect them, and putting up something to call a layout for the game is like a necessary evil. And when the game is done I don't play with it. So why on earth do I spend countless hours on the dress ups if I don't even know what's so fun about them? I'll probably never figure out the correct answer, but I think that it has something to do with the combination of the pack rat tendency of hoarding reference pictures, the need to satisfy my tingling dress up sense of "there has to be a dress up of this subject, and I want to be the one to create it!", and some sort of weird form of masochism involving drawing one dress for two and a half hours. What I do know is that even right now I'm rolling around when I have ideas for 6 games I definitely MUST do right NOW when at the same time I already have three almost finished projects waiting on my computer.