Rachel 5/16/10

I'm visiting my parents in east Tennessee, but I found a bit of time to sketch today while my mom read a book and my dad did some garden-puttering. It's possible that this is my last set of mask renderings. I'm fairly sure which six i want to do out of the twelve i've drawn thus far...

These are the Captain and the Doctor, aka Il Capitano and Il Dottore. I really love these guys! It's really cool how a lot of these stock characters have some conventional or standardized features, but are still so manipulatable in terms of imposing your own style on them.

Il Capitano is either proud/conceited or angry/piratical; i obviously picked the angry/piratical version. I'm envisioning his stache as being some kind of actual fur or hair so that it has some movement.

Il Dottore is based on the birdlike plague doctor mask in this case, but i also wanted to evoke the worried, befuddled old-man-like quality that some Dottore masks i've seen have. I'm undecided about his eyebrows--i've seen some great Dottores with fluffy fiber brows, which might be a fun element to add to him.

Now that you've seen all twelve renderings of these, which is your favorite?

Rachel 5/14/10

This may be my last one for a while, since as soon as i post this, i'm off to parts west for vacation and the SPESA Expo. I'm taking my sketchbook and pastels with me, as i'm hoping to finish preliminary sketching by Wednesday so i can start the maquette sculpting of whatever the final mask designs wind up being. I don't know whether i'll have time to photograph and write up any sketches i do between now and then though. We'll see.

These two masks are the Young Lovers. I'd been putting off doing them because i find the idea of their expressions hard to conceptualize--they need to be sort of blank slates, so the performers can indicate a huge range of emotions, and they need to be young looking, attractive-looking, perhaps innocent even.

For my own part, i also wanted their features and face-shapes to be as neutral as possible, so they could be worn by performers of any ethnicity or body-type without a disbelief-suspension issue of say, a mask with extremely bony features on a stocky or curvaceous performer.

I've seen a lot of these Young Lovers masks with the dimensional swirls on the cheeks, and i love that element so i retained it in mine. I also decided to employ a lip shape that feels more childlike than the angular peaked cupid's-bow lip shapes in many of my other mask sketches.

I am fairly certain these are two of the ones we'll actually be making; i'm considering hosting a poll over in La Bricoleuse to vote on the other mask styles, once i'm done sketching. That might be a fun way to bring some more community involvement into this project, soliciting input on the final grouping.

Rachel 5/12/10

Today's a weird one, inspirationally speaking. I had some vague ideas about wanting in my next pair of mask sketches to explore the ideas of suggested hairlines along the top edge, and whether incorporation of upper teeth could work. I also wanted some definite specific faces to influence the structure of the features.

I think it's fairly clear that the mask on the left was based on a young Billy Idol's iconic sneering expression and widow's peak. The mask on the right is a bit more obscure: it's modeled on Steve Buscemi with his buggy eyes and thin upper lip and receding-pattern hairline.

I'm happier with Steve as a general Commedia mask design--if you know it's based on him, maybe you kinda see it, but he could be any older character of whatever gender and could display a range of emotions; Billy is clearly and obviously Billy to me (does that make me old?) and less versatile of a mask. I am pretty sure i don't like teeth on character masks that aren't of the stupidity-as-comic-relief zanni variety, but i'm willing to be persuaded otherwise if any of y'all feel differently on that topic.

I know i'm really busting them out right now in terms of not taking much downtime between sketch posts; i'm trying to build up a cushion because i'm headed out of town on Friday for a book release party, then a family visit, then the SPESA EXPO 2010, so i'll be incommunicado for nearly a week.

SPESA proves to be pretty exciting--it's the Sewn Products Equipment and Suppliers of the Americas exposition, and will have miles upon miles of industrial sewing equipment demos, fabric and trim vendors, production companies and dye services, printers, mills, software developers, you name it! I've never been before, and am very excited to attend this one. I'll be reporting on it over in La Bricoleuse, which you can now like on Facebook if that's how you prefer to aggregate your blog consumption.

Rachel 5/11/10

Two more mask designs, again in oil pastel.

For the one on the left, i was going for an older female face, with a sort of wry happy expression. The one on the right is based on this really beefy bald man's face i found, in which he looked sort of ominous and sad.

I'm not as happy with either of these as with yesterday's masks--these look kind of superhero-ish to me. Or, maybe supervillainy. I saw Iron Man 2 yesterday so maybe that is subconsciously influencing my perception. I enjoy drawing these, and using the oil pastel medium, so i will probably keep doing them in variations on this theme until i get six i want to actually make for real.

I'm open to suggestion, if anybody's got a challenge for a facial expression or a stock Commedia character to render...

Rachel 5/10/10

Back to Commedia mask designs.

I did these two sort of intending them to be female characters, but they don't look particularly gendered at all. They're done in oil pastel on the same long sketchpad that i used for my prior mask sketches. I did a hint of a wearer's lip/chin in these, and i think they kind of help with scale.

I'd forgotten how much i LOVE working in oil pastel, how fast it goes and how awesomely blendable and stripped-down it can be. It really lends itself well to these Commedia mask designs, in that, i need to be thinking in broad expressive planes and shapes, but the blending and smudging properties of the oil pastels give the simple shapes a lot of depth and interest.

I was just sort of farting around with facial variations, but i like these two so much, they might actually wind up being two of the real deals. We'll see....

Rachel 5/7/10

One of the projects i'm doing this summer is creating a set of Commedia dell'Arte masks. I've done a bunch of research and have planned the production calendar, spec'ed out the materials cost and labor estimate, and have verbal agreements with a couple of assistants for the matrix sculpting and actual production work. What's left to be done before we start is to settle on the designs for the masks themselves.

I was really inspired by the mask designs of WT Benda (whose work was exhibited at USITT this year) and have always admired the work of Alyssa Ravenwood in this area. So it was with those two artists' masks in mind that i began these ultra-preliminary sketches.

This sketch is the very first two hints of breaths of ideas, absolutely not to be considered the final designs at all. I wanted to try drawing two front-view mask concepts, an angry character and a worried/sad character, using some of the conventions of Commedia mask design--deep lines of hyperbolic expression, planar/bulbous feature exaggeration, and monochrome colorization.

I am undecided about whether i think it's helpful or distracting to draw a human lower jaw into these designs, as that's not part of the mask itself. I'll do that for the next set and see how i feel, but i'd love input as well. If you were sculpting half-masks from a design rendering, do you want to see the face of the wearer under there in the design, or just a couple of style marks like a chinline and lipline?

For an actual rendering (further down the road) i'd use this long sketchpad to create a single mask design, front view on the left and profile on the right, since i'll have two other sculptors on this project in addition to myself, and want to make sure we're all working on the same metaphorical page, so to speak.

Pretty excited about this project!