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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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.

 

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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Teaching

Costume Class Project: Primary and Secondary Research on an Historical Costume Topic

Many costume students are drawn to the field by an enthusiasm for one or more historical periods of dress. This project allows you to research an era, or ideally a small easy to handle segment of it, such as an object like a codpiece or a flag fan, or a particular type of garment, and make a new web page devoted to it. To do this well, and legally, you will need to find visual representations of your era or object that are copyright expired, make ones you create yourself, or which date before the concept of copyright existed. Before uploading images please refer to Wikimedia Copyright Rules to determine what is OK to post.

You also will wish to research your topic two ways. You will wish to consult both secondary sources and primary sources. In the case of costume history, examples of a primary source would include:

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Teaching

Costume Class Project: Visual Historical Research for a Play

Costume Class Project: Historical Research Project

Step 1: Read and review in your mind the characters and setting of one of the following plays: [Note: Your instructor may assign different plays}

Chekhov’s decidedly slapstick One Act ‘The Marriage Proposal’: (aka ‘The Proposal‘, or ‘A Proposal of Marriage’) which has a Mel Brooks/Three Stooges feel. This play may be written by one of the founders of serious modern drama, but this is no drama, it is more like a 1900 Russian Saturday Night Live skit without the intellectual content.

‘Patience’: Aristocratic ladies who were engaged to cavalry officers, now spurn their fiancées in order to follow a fashionable (Oscar Wilde-like) poet in a goofy cult-like ardor. The poet, meanwhile, has the hots for a low born milkmaid. The soldiers plot to get the girls back, another sexy poet arrives on the scene, and chaos ensues. An operetta set in the Aesthetic movement in England of the 1880’s.

‘The Contrast‘: a 1787 American play that combines comedy and patriotic sentiments. Filled with characters that in transmuted form are still with us. The gossipy ingénues talk like 18th Century Valley Girls.

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