Kyle 3/29/10

Toward the end of my sketching Into the Woods, I asked my Facebook friends for suggestions for a new project. I got all kinds of suggestions, but the one that stood out the most to me was from my fellow contributor, Rachel, who suggested The Children's Hour by Lillian Hellman. I remember reading it years and years ago in Undergrad and remembered that I enjoyed it. The next day I had some time to kill after work and stopped by the University Library to see if they had a copy. I couldn't put it down...

I'll go into the plot of the play later, but, just so you know, a good deal of it is set in a girl's boarding school in New England run by two young women in the early 1930s. The character I sketched today is Mary Tilford, a spoiled girl with a major chip on her shoulder. She bullies the other girls, has fits, fakes illness and is just generally a bad seed. It doesn't help that her Grandmother is very rich and has helped the two women start the school.

School uniforms are so very interesting to me. I went to Catholic School, but our uniforms were really casual, but some uniforms are very put together and rigid. I found a really great image of a young girl in her school uniform in the late 1920, which consisted of a blouse, tie, and jumper. Her blouse was plain white, but I decided that I don't want the uniform to be too foreboding, so I decided to go for a striped blouse in blue and white, with the tie and sash navy and the jumper a nice wool jersey. There are eight other girls with this same costume (Multiples! YAY!) and Mary's uniform would have to be doubled as it is supposed to look really dirty in Act Two.

I've never really sketched anything in the 1930s so this is going to be an interesting project! I may have to take more frequent breaks to work on some summer stuff (I'll keep everyone posted on that) but I'll try to stay as regular as possible!

Rachel 3/27/10

So, this is a totally new experience for me, this sketch. My father has loaned me a wacom tablet computer to experiment with, and i decided to try using it to sketch.

This costume design rendering is my very first shot at drawing anything more complex than an arrow or a moustache using a tablet computer in Paint.

First, let me talk a bit about the design itself.

Alma's wearing a suit here, inspired by the jacket in this fashion plate here. I made up a skirt to go with it, based on a similar asymmetrical skirt design from a fashion magazine print source i have. This is the scene where she runs out on her parents to go strolling with Dr. Buchanan, and winds up in the arbor rebuffing his advances.

I enjoy the idea that she'd wear a suit rather than a dress for what she considers her "first date" with him, that she would perhaps think it would draw a sharper contrast between her seriousness and "respectability," and the dissipated sensuality of his lover, Rosa Gonzales. (I can't wait to design Rosa's costumes, BTW.) And, in keeping with this conception of Alma, even though she's wearing a suit, she's carrying a bright rust silk parasol and has that swooping prow of a plumed hat on. Alma's accessories show where she's headed as a character, the side of her she keeps repressed, mostly. Her clothes say no, but her hats say yes, so to speak.

As for drawing with a tablet, i'm intrigued. I will continue to experiment and sketch with it (at least until i need to give it back to my dad), to see how i feel about it as a potential design tool. I enjoy that it still allows me to be "sketchy" to a certain degree using the pencil option and the smallest brushes, and that it's so easy to lay in color as you go. I also like that, in a practical sense, i could crank out these quick-sketch renderings and email them to a director in full immediate color without all the scanning and Photoshop-tweaking wankery that i do with paper sketches.

I'm not thrilled with how...i dunno, how "cold" this sketch looks to me, in that it's not got the same life and variety of line quality that a pencil has. Shading blows with this, too; i couldn't get it to look right at all.

As a production artisan, i know that i could look at this rendering (particularly supported with research) and make this hat, this parasol, this suit; but something's lost. I know what my sketching style looks like in pencil and in ink and paint, and i can kind of see my own hand at work here, but the quality of line is just flat out different and i don't know how i feel about it yet.

One thing i do love is, i figured out how to do a pretty good hand way easier with the Paint tools--hands are something i've always struggled with, and no matter how many i draw, i always find them difficult and challenging. With this drawing, i sketched Alma's right hand last, first using the largest round paintbrush and then going back into it with the smallest brush to do some lines to indicate the glove. It's probably the best hand i've drawn in a long time. Which i guess isn't saying much, since i only just got back into sketching after a long hiatus, but still. I'm sure that the more i work with it, the more i'll discover similar techniques that will make a more refined looking sketch overall.

I'm looking forward to experimenting more with this tool--i think the next rendering i do with it, i'm going to stick to greyscale and try to work more with the sketchiness, see whether i can produce something that looks to me more like my sketching style.

I'd love to hear from any designers who use a wacom tablet in their renderings, and tips and tricks or feedback or voice-of-experience impressions, etc.!

Kyle 3/25/10

And now, my friends, we come to the end of Into the Woods...but first, let me explain this last character...

The Mysterious Man is played by the Narrator (that's why his clothes have to be easy in, easy out) and has been living in the woods for years and years and years. We find out late in the first act that he is the Baker's Father who went kinda crazy after the Witch takes the new born Rapunzel and his wife dies of grief. He's in a kind of tunic that could be a ripped and torn period shirt that he went into the woods wearing. The baggy leggings are bound with braided vines (this is also the tie belt). He has a really rough short sleeve jacket made of patchwork leather and a jaunty scarf made out of a dead fox (super hot!). The hat is actually a really early medieval hat. I really liked it because it looks like an acorn...

I had a lot of fun with Into the Woods. I leaned a whole lot and did some pretty good drawings...I'm gonna have to paint some of these some day...I keep saying that, I know, but maybe I'll take some time and do it this summer...maybe with markers...

Eric 3/25/10

I've been out of the loop, blogosphere. I had a lot of homework to do the past week, none of which allowed me any time for drawing. But, Go, Dog! Go! is looking grrrrreat (promo shots are tomorrow, so I'll post some of those), and I got a script written for our spring break theatre school next week.

Although I should be resuming with Willy Wonka, I just got hired to do an emergency puppet for Jen Matthews who is designing Goodnight, Moon at Charlotte Children's Theatre. I have VERY little time. Since we don't have the option of meeting, I decided to do a sketch based on her lovely costume rendering. Just so we're clear: Jen's sketch is the colored one, mine is the pencil.

The actress playing the dish is TINY, so deciding these proportions was really important. Plus, I hope this sketch will begin a conversation about what this puppet looks like in profile. I learned from designing Pinocchio this past fall, that puppets have to be designed in 360, or it makes the crafting extremely tedious.

For the proportions, I compared the actress's measurements to the sketch, and drew out from there. I also pulled a tablespoon from the kitchen, because I never have actually thought about a spoon from the profile before.

So, we'll see if this sketch gets the ball rolling! Good to be back: I really missed blog/sketching.

Kyle 3/24/10

Ah, more costumes that are on stage for about 2 minutes...

In the second act of Into the Woods the two Princes (who married Cinderella and knocked up Rapunzel in the first act) happen upon Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, both snoozing away in a glass casket or tall tower, and change their minds about their relationships. We don't actually see these two drowsy dames until the last few bars of the last song and during curtain call...

Snow white is is a peasanty blouse with a kind of Germanic jumper and sash. She's got some flowers in her hair...those dwarfs had to do something!

Sleeping Beauty has been asleep for a long time. I didn't want to go medieval (saving that for the Witch and Rapunzel) so I decided to go Tudor. She is a Princess and the Tudor period is two and a half centuries away from the story time period...that's a long enough nap, in my opinion.

Often, these characters are done as almost direct copies of the Disney versions. That's a really really funny and cute sight gag and all, but I wanted to do something different...I don't know. These don't necessarily scream "Snow White" and "Sleeping Beauty", but, egh, sketching them was fun.

I was a little distracted as I sketched tonight. The Metropolitan Opera's new production of Les contes d'Hoffmann was on PBS and I was completely enthralled. It was absolutely gorgeously sung, and the costumes were really interesting....and then they showed previews for this season's productions of Carmen and Der Rosenkavalier and I peed my pants (metaphorical, of course).

Rachel 3/23/10

I decided that my next sketching project would be Tennessee Williams'
play Summer and Smoke.

I saw an excellent community production of this play when i was maybe about 14 or 15, and it has always remained one of my favorites. (Let's not delve into what that says about my psyche.)

It's set in an interesting time period for clothes--1914--when men are dapper and women are in that strange transitional phase between the pigeon-breasted wasp-waisted fin de siecle style and the dropped-waist bobbed-hair boy-bodied look of the 1920s. Ankles are starting to show as hems rise, yet bustlines are being more compressed and weirdly flattened. The very fashion itself echos what's going on in the head and heart of this play's protagonist. The script also has lots of hats and parasols (even as character-building plot-points), which are a personal favorite in my real-life day-job of milliner and crafts artisan.

One thing I admit I had not really considered when I stepped up to challenge myself as a contributor to this blog, was that not only would I be generating sketches, but also doing a lot of the preliminary research and paperwork for costume design. I mean, true, with a paper sketch-only project you don't have to concern yourself with budget or collaboration with a director or the rest of a design team, nor in this case do you have to address color palettes or swatching. But unless you are just doing life drawing of non-naked people, you do have to create costume plots to determine double-casting, quick changes, and so forth, and actually think about style line choices as a means of conveying character within the context of a given period or script.

So, I dashed off a costume plot last night and figured out how I'd double-up my cast to cover all the roles in this show. I did an admittedly somewhat cursory perusal of various period styles (thumbing through reference books from the shop library at work and image-googling fashions of 1910-1914), and spent some time thinking about the characters within the context of those clothes.

Today, I have a first sketch to share: Miss Alma Winemiller's first costume in Act I. It's the Fourth of July in a small Mississippi town, and she's just given a singing performance on the bandstand in the town square.

Alma is a study in contradictions--in fact, that's the premise of the play, pretty much, an exploration of how someone so at odds with herself or himself deals with being both attracted and repelled by another person equally splintered. Alma is a pastor's daughter whose mother is mentally ill. She's been to finishing school and people in town think of her as someone who puts on airs. She's a music teacher, leads an intellectual society for discussing poetry and literature; she considers herself artistically-minded and fashion-forward, but at the same time is devout in her faith and bound by the restrictive upbringing of a pastor's daughter. She craves witty repartee and flirtation, while at the same time being shocked by impropriety and ribaldry.

I looked at a lot of clothes from this time period and was excited about some of the interesting images of asymmetrical design elements and style lines--so many great asymmetrical closure and ornament details on the blouses and the cut of the skirts. All of Alma's costumes will employ elements of asymmetry, both as a nod to her desire to come off as sophisticated and to indicate her internal struggle between the two sides of her personality.

As Alma explores more facets of the warring sides of herself over the course of the play, I'm planning to push the asymmetrical elements more. Here she's just got the unusual single-lapel bodice and the prim little trios of buttons. And of course that amazing hat. Hats in this period are fascinating--still fairly large but tending toward the styles that became more popular in smaller form a decade later. Alma is just theatrical and dorky enough to think that this modified bicorne-almost-a-tricorne style would be just perfect for an Independence Day performance in the park.

It's clear in the script that the Winemiller women love their millinery, are regular patrons of the local hat shop (Alma's mother shoplifts a hat during the course of the play), and i like the idea that Alma takes the most risks with her hat styles.

So there she is when we first meet her, the preacher's daughter with her barely concealed crush on the rakish, damaged young Doctor John Buchanan...

Man, now i wish we were actually doing this show! :D

Kyle 3/22/10

Not too much to say about this sketch...He's the Narrator of Into the Woods. He comes on and tells some of the story, introducing characters and starting the stories going.

Because he's not directly involved with the story (until the second act, at least) his costume isn't set in period. I think of him as a grandfatherly type, reading the stories to the audience. The costume is total central casting Grandfather - slacks (with suspenders, of course), button-front shirt, cardigan sweater, beat up dress shoes, reading glasses. He doubles as another character during the show, so all this has to be easy off and on...

Speaking of the drawing - I'm quite pleased with the face...it is kind of an unholy marriage of Bill Black (Eric knows who that is...and we love him) and Stanley Tucci's child rapist character in The Lovely Bones (google it...you will be afraid). Despite the scary love-childness of the face, I really like it.

Now, back to Dancing with the Stars! GO NIECY NASH (and her juggly parts)!!!