Tag Archives: Rendering

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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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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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