Category Archives: Costume Designers

Costume Designers

Head Over Heels, Costume Design Renderings in Progress

These renderings are for our upcoming musical at Diablo Valley College for Spring 2021. We will be filming it instead of playing it live, and it hopefully will be downloadable in pay per view in May 2021, and filming in March and April. All costumes will include masks and much of the filming will take place outdoors. I am currently inventing types of masks that can work as parts of costumes, which I will post about in detail shortly . Principals will have clear masks of two types, while the chorus will have cloth masks.

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Costume Designers, Rendering, Teaching

Costume Class Project: Designing in Cooperation

The “Lecture” (please read):

One of the first points that should be made about costuming is that it is part of a social organism. The organism may be part of a University theatre program, or part of a film production company, community theatre, Renaissance Faire producing group, television series producing studio, or professional repertory theatre, etc. However in all cases, costuming exists as a piece of a much bigger pie, in which costume is not the center, but a support to a larger whole. This is the key to understanding what we do. We exist as one of the heads of a multi-headed beast trying to create ‘ art.’ If we don’t talk or get along with the other heads, if we try to pull in the opposite direction from that which the rest of the beast is going, we trip over our own feet, and go nowhere at all.

Therefore, lesson number one: everyone must talk to each other, get to understand how one’s cohorts think, trade ideas, make suggestions, and then, when all the heads find a consensus on which way to go, go, go, go…..GO with commitment in the direction chosen, even if it means going over a cliff in one’s individual opinion.

This is very hard to do.

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Costume Designers, Teaching

Costume Class Project: Six Renderings for “Patience”

6 Renderings for “Patience” Project

Step 1: Using the data you found in the Historical Research Project incorporate your research into colored designs for 6 of the characters in Gilbert & Sullivan’s Patience

You need not follow the research slavishly, but the evidence of your sources should be apparent in your drawings. Then label your drawings something like this:

 

If you have difficulty drawing figures, you can print out some of the outline sheets below, and do your renderings on these sheets. Printing the sheet onto card stock will allow you to use watercolors without having the paper wrinkle

Another way of Making rendering easier is to make a “Dancing Man”:

Make this out of heavy card stock, connect the pieces with brads as shown in the center, and lay it on your paper to make different poses for your body-outlines.

Step 2

Scan and post the images you drew to your files section and post a notification on the message board that you have done renderings for this play and would appreciate feedback from the other students.

 

Costume Designers, How-To, Rendering, Teaching

Costume Class Project: Focusing on the Actor – Rendering for “On The Harm of Tobacco”

Theatrical costume design is primarily (although not exclusively) concerned with supporting the actor in his/her interpretation of character.

Step 1: Read the monologue play On the Harm of Tobacco (aka “Smoking is Bad for You”) by Anton Chekhov and ask yourself the following actor-type questions about the man who makes this speech:

If this man were a car, what kind of car would he be?

If this man was an animal, which would he be?

What do you think he has in his pockets?

If he were a woman in the present time (!), how would she dress?

If he could choose to kill himself, or kill his wife, which would he do?

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Costume Designers, Costume Studio, Jobs, Teaching

Salary and Respect Issues in Costuming

This page contains my opinions that I posted many years ago to a thread on The Costumer’s Manifesto eGroup  about salary and respect issues for costumers. To see other posts by people on this thread, go to the eGroup:

No one seems to have mentioned the key to the low salaries for costumers and other stitchers: It is “Women’s Work”.

The bottom paid job in every country in the world is that of seamstress, and as costuming relates closely to stitching, and is done by a workforce that is 95% female, it is often paid in a similar fashion.

You can look in theatre departments across the US and you will also find that the costume designer is usually the lowest paid faculty, and in many cases is lower paid “staff” when all other positions are tenured faculty. It is rather unusual for the costume designer to feel she is taken as seriously as an artist by directors or other designers. It isn’t unheard of for a costume designer to be rated as an equal, and I’m happy to say UAF is one place where we (the theatre faculty) all agree this is the proper way to do things, but even at UAF, once the level goes up a rung to administration, it isn’t necessarily the case. I’m the only faculty in Theatre with a Ph.D., and yet I’m still lowest paid of those who came in when I did, because our former dean set our incoming salaries when we were hired. Magically, a female costumer was “worth” substantially less than either male stage director, a salary differential that widened as time wore on.

There are lots of things costumers do, even in faculty positions that encourage colleagues to think less of their design skills however. Some things to remember if you want more respect:

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Advice, Costume Designers

Travel For The Soul

TRAVEL IS INSPIRING: While I am tolerably certain that Vaslav Nijinsky and Leon Bakst did not absolutely need to go to Greece to respectively choreograph and design the Ancient Greek themed 1911 ballet Afternoon of a Faun, I’m sure it helped. What is more, I expect that they enjoyed it too. And while the IRS probably (in its wisdom) would have frowned upon them trying to deduct it as a business expense (had they been modern Americans), it is true that travel is one of the best methods for any type of artist to get inspiration.

TRAVEL NEEDN’T BE NICE TO WORK: Travel need not be glamorous or expensive or comfortable to be inspiring. It is a recorded fact that Bertolt Brecht wrote most of the rough scripts for his greatest works (Mother Courage, The Good Woman of Szechwan, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle) while staying in refugee camps during W.W.II, fleeing the Nazis by walking/hitching rides from Germany to Manchuria, going through Stalin’s USSR. True he wrote the smooth finished drafts of these in the comfort of Southern California, but the inspiration, the ideas, they came from a grueling trek across hostile territory in the midst of a war. Travel is good for an artist if it doesn’t kill her.

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Advice, Costume Designers

The Costumer Within

Please note, if you are getting this out of context, this essay was written as part of a Costumer’s self-help book of advice back in January 1995

“I, MYSELF, AM STRANGE AND UNUSUAL”: Just because I’m giving out advice, please do not assume I am in any way “well-adjusted” or (God forbid) “normal.” I am, and have been, to my earliest memories, one of life’s outcasts. The Weird One. Born as one of those crazy artist people who is oh-so-creative but really, cannot possibly deal with the real world. I do not mean to say I am helpless. Quite the contrary. Being strange and unusual means you are pretty much on your own most of the time, and you get very good in dealing with problems from moving to finances to flat tires on your own. But I am the sort of person who decides to enliven a dull day by going out in a false mustache, monocle and frock coat for the evening. I’ll sit at home, watching the same videotaped TV show over and over while I paint giant twisted faces on canvas night after night. Or write this book in my flat for days, when I should go out shopping, because I think “another day of using newspaper for the toilet won’t be so bad.” So I’m giving advice, not as one of those superior “cured” people, who has found Jesus, or is listening to Prozac or whatever, but as one of the sick crazy people, who wants to remain a costumer, remain strange, remain unusual, because, really, art (self-expression) is more important to me than toilet paper.

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Costume Designers, Russian

Russian Art Deco Mystery Costume Designs

I have here two costume design renderings, (below) in gouache, for a dance piece, that I bought on eBay absurdly cheap:

 

They were framed, and sealed, and between the paper, and other indications, I’d guess them somewhere from 1920-1940. There is no signature, notes or stamps. The left image is of a Russian Folk dancer, the right, is a folk dancer of another nationality (Italian? Spanish? Hungarian?). They are obviously by a Russian designer, but who, and from what show? I’m not interested in selling them, but I am interested in finding out who did them, or the production they are from. Any suggestions may be sent to me. Chances are that if you don’t understand why I say they are definitely by a Russian from 1920-1940, you won’t have the answer. However, you might be able to identify the nationality of the dancer’s dress on the right better than I can. So far two people have sent me ideas, one that the designs are by Alexandra Exter the other idea was Tatiana Puni, but I can’t confirm either of these. The closest designs I’ve found in a book are by Pavel Tchelitchew, but they are not that close in style. A guy from Yugoslavia thinks that the figure on the right represents a Hungarian, and I think that guess may be correct. ……Dec., 3, 2017

Costume Designers, Jobs

Portfolios and Resumes

PORTFOLIOS FOR ALL YOUR JOBS: Most advice on portfolios for costumers tends to center on straight design portfolios. Yet there are relatively few design jobs out there that consist solely of costume design. My own fairly typical university position at UAF is supposed to consist of equal parts of teaching, research, and public service in my field. In other words, for my job I must, in addition to costume design all shows, teach classes in costume design, costume history, stage makeup and theatre history, do research and publications in my field, do related public services like curate exhibits of costumes for museums, advise local schools about costumes and makeup for shows, teach every sort of cutting and construction in the costume shop, and do periodic displays, posters, and photos for publicity. For me to go to an interview with only a design portfolio would be to leave out more than two-thirds of my work.

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