Tag Archives: Costume Design

Designs, How-To

Lion Costume for Head Over Heels (Film), Diablo Valley College, 2021

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I don’t know if this would have come as a surprise to me if it were not 2020-2021 when we went from the idea of doing Head Over Heels as a first part of Fall semester stage musical, to a film production taking up the whole Spring Semester and only premiering for streaming download this June of 2021 (final weekend of streaming is 6/18/21-6/20/21), but I did not realize until we were a week or two into filming that there was supposed to be a lion in this show. For a long time I did not have a script (while we were getting the OK for making a film) and I did most of my designs only having seen a “Slime Tutorial” of a production taken from dodgy angles before putting pen to paper. So when I was asked a week into filming what the Lion costume was going to look like, my reaction was “What Lion Costume?”

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Designs, How-To, Masks

Making Masks for the “Head Over Heels” Chorus

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Picture of a KN95 Mask covered with a smiling cloth cover
Picture of a KN95 Mask covered with a smiling cloth cover

The masks for the chorus of Head Over Heels (Film, 2021 Diablo Valley College) were made by sewing a cloth cover which had been drawn with sharpies to a KN95 mask. You can see the images below of the cloth covers before application to the masks. If you want to make a similar mask you can print out these pages and use them with a light box to see and draw out the images to replicate or adapt these designs.

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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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Designs

Pencil and paper Ballerina Dress Tutorial

This is a how to make a Pencil and Paper Ballerina Dress by Ashleigh Marie LaMarre

Here is the link to the tutorial!

These are all the materials you will need to complete this dress:

-Gift wrapping paper, or note book paper, or any type of thin paper

-a large quantity of wooden pencils any color 

-hot glue gun with glue sticks or another type of glue but it may take longer to dry if you use a liquid glue

-a 10-14in zipper that matches the color of your pencils

-a section of fabric that is the measurement of your waist With a little seam allowance

-dressmaker pins 

-a measuring tape

-scissors

If you like what you see here please check out Ashleigh Marie LaMarre’s online portfolio! Thank you!

https://ashleighmarielamarre.wordpress.com

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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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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