With the paper draft from before, and some pictures from Google, I finished drawing the draft of the dress.
It was MUCH easier to get the shapes and designs right with references right there. It turned out better than I expected, and this is just the draft.
A few notes
The first change was that I lengthened the skirt so the whole thing was a bit more in proportion, which led to a slight redesign of the skirt to better reflect the building.
The shawl was done in another colour so as not to confuse myself with which line is dress and which is shawl.
And as I continue to work on this it has become less focused on the character and more a focus on the dress. I may end up doing the final drawing less for the sake of drawing the character, but more for the sake of the dress.
Some things I’ll still have to consider for the future is the colour scheme, which might end up being the off-white/cream/grey of stone and the (predominately blue and red) array of colours from the rose windows for the ruff. This will flip the usual colour theme as more, if not all, ruff are depicted as white even though they were historically dyed with different coloured starch.
Another thing is, I haven’t even decided on the final masquerade design for the character: hair, mask, make up. I’ll have to work on that too.