Category Archives: Rendering

Designs, Props, Rendering

How to take the Shadow Puppet Renderings and Use them to make the shadow puppet Prototypes for [Dreamer] Project: an Undocuplay

Design for Shadow puppet of Ariadne

UPDATE!: So, as of this week the test puppets were approved as the finished size, so the shadow puppets we are making will be done with 1 sheet of foam core (Ariadne, Theseus & Ship) or 2 pieces (Dionysus, Leopard & Minotaur). I have designed these for the “Ariadne’s Story” portion of the film version of Kathleen Normington’s [Dreamer] Project: an Undocuplay we are doing under her direction. (Images of my designs are available in printable PDFs below, or can also be accessed at Google Photos: The Dreamer Project.) Based on what was done in the previous stage play version at SJSU most of the shadow puppets were about the size of a sheet of foam core or slightly larger. The puppets will be used with rear lighting or projections on our scrim in our PAC Mainstage Theatre and filmed.

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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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Designs, Rendering, Teaching

Costume Class Project: No Color Designs

Color is such a useful trick for establishing character and group identity in plays that often designers forget that pattern, texture and especially silhouette can also be more effective design tools. One of the best exercises one can do to force oneself to rely more on these tools, so as not to get rusty, is to design a show periodically that is either monochromatic (uses only one color) or de-saturated (uses only gradients of black and white). It is the latter that you will do here.

To see an example of a show done in this manner see my designs for a low-budget student production of The Seagull done in Russia some years ago.

The Project:

10 characters from a Shakespeare Play that you will render using only black and/or white or gradients of the same. Using silhouette, line, and other means still left to you, delineate the characters and their relationships with one another. You may set the play in any era before 1916, in any culture, or you may costume them totally abstractly, but do not set it any time in the last 100 years of Western civilization’s clothes, or you will get unduly distracted by your modern mental associations with certain garments.

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Rendering, Teaching

Costume Class Project: 6 Renderings for “The Contrast”

6 Renderings for “The Contrast” 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 Royall Tyler’s The Contrast.

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:

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Rendering, Teaching

Costume Class Project: 3 Renderings for “The Marriage Proposal”

Step 1

Using the data you found in the Historical Research Project incorporate your research into designs for the three characters in Anton Chekhov’s one act farce The Marriage Proposal. 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.

Whenever you have spare time this semester, teach yourself more about rendering by going to this links page for more lessons.

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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