Impression Sunrise Assignment

"Impression Sunrise" by Monet

One of our Costume Design class assignments with Susan Tsu is to design costumes based on an Impressionist painting. I chose "Impression Sunrise" by Monet. I'll be designing one male and one female ballet costume based on the painting. I've always loved this painting with all of it's lovely colors that so closely mimic the real colors of a sunrise.

Part of the assignment was a copy project - to paint a segment of the image in watercolors. Of course, I chose the whole middle section of the painting because of it's lovely details, but it took me forever to reproduce!

1940s Dress Flat Patterning

In my flat patterning class my classmate, Elisabeth, and I are creating patterns for these two lovely 1940s dresses. I'm creating the above dress to fit Elisabeth, and she's creating the dress below to fit me. On Tuesday we'll have a fitting to see how well we did!

I love the above dress - isn't it lovely? I'd love to one day make a 1940s dress out of some blue-green silk that I have in my stash. Vince purchased a 1940s suit several years ago, but we've never gotten to dress up and go out together in 1940s attire.

Eduardo Castro visits CMU

This weekend, Costume Designer, Eduardo Castro, flew in from Hollywood to assist our Costume Design and Production graduate class on a tv filming project. Castro is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University's Costume Design program and now designs for movies and tv shows. It was so lovely to meet him and have his advice on both my tv project costume designs and portfolio. We spent the weekend working on our tv projects and hearing him tell wonderful stories of the costume design projects that he's worked on since leaving CMU. You can see his IMDB page here.

He told us so many lovely stories about his good friend Milena Canonero, who designed the costumes for the amazing costume movies 'Marie Antoinette', 'The Affair of the Necklace', and 'Barry Lindon', that I now feel like I've already met her.

Such an inspiring and lovely work weekend! I'm not so excited to get started revamping my portfolio yet again. I've grown so much since leaving Penn State and can't wait to see how many more skills I aquire while here at Carnegie Mellon. Each day I learn a handful of new skills and tricks of the trade. It's so exciting going to class and learning something new.