Spring 2011 Renderings

Before I packed away my renderings during the great sewing room cleanup, I snapped a few photos of the renderings that I completed last school year. This is not the best documentation, but it will do for now.

Above: Prismacolor pencil rendering. This was actually begun in undergrad and finally finished last year. I'm pretty happy with it, although I wish that I had done it on a slightly lighter colored paper.

Designs for Dance Light 2011. This year I will be designing and building a man's ballet costume for Dance Light. Watercolor.

Dance Light - female lead.

Watercolor Pencil.

"Impression Sunrise" Costumes

{"Impression Sunrise" by Monet}

For Costume Design I class our assignment was to select and Impressionist painting and copy or square section of it with watercolor, and then to respond to that copy by creating two costume designs, one female and one male.

I was really happy with my copy of the original work. It was very difficult to translate an oil painting into watercolor. Unfortunately I wasn't able to get a good image of it to share with you. It was hard enough to take photos of these renderings with my computer. Heh. At some point I'll photograph and add it.

I chose to create ballet costumes in response to the painting. Ultimately, I wasn't happy with the way the designs came out. I spent way more time on the painting copy and struggled with the male costume, not knowing what I wanted to capture. I don't really have any experience with designing dance costumes, so just researching mens ballet costumes was very enlightening. I would love to redo the assignment if I get time...but I'm not sure how likely that is in this crazy busy graduate program!

Very lightweight and delicate tulle skirt. Blue overlay with purple and light green layers underneath. The shoes would be much better in a nude color...I realized how much the dark shoes shorten the look of the leg as soon as I painted it on the page!

I'm still working on my watercolor techniques. We're encouraged to use all watercolor in class. But I've used some watercolor pencils here to get the shadowed areas. I'd love to get more shadowing in the hair and faces in the future. Learning!

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!

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.