Fashion Wheel update and my new pen

A few people suggested trying coloured pencils might be less smeary. Well I gave that a go, and it wasn't terribly successful, but then I found a 3B Caran d'Ache graphite stick I had lying around and tried that instead. It was much better and I got a lot more of the detail. Unfortunately 3B is really quite soft and I managed to smear it with my hand while colouring in, plus the coloured pencil ran into it a bit, but it's definitely better. Next time I'm at the art shop I'll look for a harder graphite stick, I bet that would be perfect. Or maybe I could use some charcoal fixative before colouring... hmm. Click to embiggen - it's definitely clearer than the previous ones.

Oh and side note - Richard bought me a nice new oblique pen holder and some pointy nibs because I want to learn copperplate writing. The writing on the Fashion Wheel drawing is me trying out the pen. I'm not claiming that this is anything like copperplate, of course, because it's most definitely not! I can do decent italics, but italics really aren't anything like handwriting (they're more like shapes and parallel lines that all look the same), and my own handwriting is dead upright and not even joined up. This is going to take a lot of effort I think :) Pretty handwriting is most definitely a lost art.

PS: I haven't cleaned this up in Photoshop at all, whereas the previous efforts were very very grubby indeed.

If I had a blog when I was 9, this is what I would have posted.

When I was a kid, my very favourite toy was Fashion Wheel. Readers in the US might not know what this is, but I'm sure they'll remember Fashion Plates which was very similar. You set the plastic head, body and legs of your choice, rubbed the black crayon over it (similar to brass rubbings), then coloured it in. And you could even use the plates to create a texture for the fabric. It was genius. Never mind that the crayon always made the faces look all smeary!

Recently I saw a post on Apartment Therapy about Fashion Plates and it made me start hankering after my Fashion Wheel, so a quick trip to Ebay later and I was the proud owner of an early 1990s model. The clothes (and heads) are slightly different to mine, which was more 70s style even though I had it in the late 80s. The special crayon had long since disappeared so I tried out a Conté crayon and a normal wax crayon and both were very smeary, I'll have to work out how to do it so it doesn't smear so much. Some of my ladies' faces look like they have been kicked! I cleaned up the outlines a bit in Photoshop so they looked a bit tidier.

Here's Richard's Fashion Wheel drawing (below). This version comes with a plate with a cat and a dalmation on it which is quite cool :-) Somehow his was less smeary than mine, maybe he didn't press so hard.
Did anyone else have Fashion Wheel or Fashion Plates? What creative toys did you like when you were a kid?