Oh those crazy Super Heroes

Tim Gunn just needs to show up places and randomly critique things.
He just convinced me to order a Tim Gunn bobblehead.  Am I years behind the trend? Probably. Does it make it any less awesome? Never!!

Turandot

 

I'm still developing these characters but here are some of my roughs for the show we're working on in a class. It's an Italian play about a Chinese princess whose father is trying to get her married. She has no interest in marriage and so she challenges each suitor to answer 3 riddles in order to win her hand. If they get the riddles wrong they get their heads cut off and hung on pikes throughout Peking. 

These costumes will probably change into something else entirely but here is my first take on these characters.

Fancy Schmanzy

 Due to an unfortunate kerfuffle with an exploding bottle of hairspray, my old camera bit the dust. But I just bought a Nikon P100 today and I love, love love it! It's very fancy and I can have more control over my photos. I really enjoyed my Casio Exilim while I had it but I've been reading too many blogs and wanting to do a bit more besides point-and-click or settling for whatever scenery settings the camera has preset. I'm now ready to take some swanky portfolio quality pictures.

Research via Flickr

 

{1960s}

This quarter I'm taking a History of Dress in the 20th Century and one of my projects is to compile a digital library of 40 images from each decade in the 1900s. I already have a pretty large stash of fashion images from magazines and ads so I wanted to challenge myself a bit and force myself to only collect photos of real people from Flickr. They are the hardest to compile and more accurate for costume research than from fashion shoots of the period (yeah, I'm a dork).

Well, I've been having far too much fun and found some pretty fantastic people. The clothes lovely (naturally), but the people are just so expressive!

Personally, I want to be the girl in the photo above. I'm seriously considering wearing my hair like that tomorrow, kerchief and all.

Here are some more photos I ♡.

{1900s & 1910s}

 

Why do I have the sudden urge to watch Anne of Green Gables?.....

{1940s}

 .....And buy sassy rounded white glasses?.....

{1900s & 1920s}

 .....While dancing on rooftops?.......


 
{1960s}

.....All while having been the best dressed kid on the block.....

{1930s & 1940s}

I just found two groups of friends I would like to join.....

{1960s}

.....Or I could hang out with this woman.

(Bonus Point: Note the cross in the top right corner)

All photos are from Flickr. Unfortunately I don't remember the photostreams for these images. If you know where they're from please let me know!

Finals for "From Dust Thou Art"

I didn't sleep for two nights following this project but it was completely worth it. The biggest challenge for this play was that these characters had to be overly distressed, with pieces and patches from whatever they could spare to fill in where their original garments were falling apart. I am used to very clean shows and it was fantastic to work on a show that required a severe falling apart appearance.

Yesterday when us first years presented our designs we were so fortunate to have the playwright Peter Grego come in to see what we had. Not only did he talk to us about the play and the real people it was based on and the original performances but he also gave us great feedback on our designs. He is currently turning this script into a screenplay for HBO.

Here are some close ups of some of the characters.

Finals for Female of the Species

Earlier I posted a couple of my next-to-finals for Female of the Species. Well finals week is now here and I just turned in my final designs for the show and here are they are.

Time well spent

Sssh...I'm in class right now but it's 6 hours long and we're not doing all that much. My sister Esther hearts Robert Pattinson so since I'm in Photoshop class and all I just did two quickies transposing her face into images with him. Hey, at least I'm applying the coursework!

Dustbowl: Swatches

My windowsill if covered in swatches for Dustbowl air-drying from this morning's over-dying. I spent this morning in the costume shop over pots in variations of taupe, ecru, and pearl grey dye vats. They're a little dark right now and I can't wait to see them when they dry and lighten up. I had previously overdyed these during a class in tans and cocoa browns but my professor proclaimed them to be too Oklahoma! because the browns were too red. Hopefully I've knocked the musical theatre right out of my color palette!

Female of the Species: Need Some Tweaking

 

Here's a peak at some of my renderings for The Female of the Species, a show I'm working on for a class project. Now that I'm looking at them together I'm seeing bits here and there where I need to give them a bit more character. Once everything is finished I'll be sure to post the whole show!

 

Dustbowl: Thumbnail

In one of my classes this quarter we are working on designing costumes for From Dust Thou Art, a play about the California migrant workers who moved from Oklahoma/Alabama/Texas during the 1930s due to the dustbowl phenomenon. It's such a powerful story based completely off of first hand accounts from those workers who came to California with next to nothing and had to make do.

This is a quickie thumbnail of one of the female characters Emily. I'm still working on the specifics but this this is just me thinking out her overall look.

Museum Sketches

I had posted earlier this year about my visit to the MET to do sketches for a museum studies project for a class. I'm also taking photoshop classes and thought I'd fix two of them up a bit more.