Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Costume Design - Elements of Design

I was cleaning out my trunk of keepsakes when I came across my college "portfolio" from my costume design class and I thought I'd share what I had. I'd love to do more of these, but unfortunately I'm usually to busy making costumes to actually draft costumes up. Plus my pattern-making skills are nil so I wouldn't necessarily be able to make what I'd design. Maybe someday I'll have the time to draft up some ideas for future costumes.

This set (there will be more) is from the start of the class when we were learning about the elements of design: Line, Form, Color, Texture. Unfortunately I seemed to have discarded my 'Line" designs so all I have are Color, Form and Texture. They were all too big for my scanner so I had to take pictures of them which is why the lighting seems odd.

Each week we did a set of designs with a new element. For line (straight or curved) we had to make a design based on a season. I think I did winter for straight and spring for curved. They were just done in pencil which is probably why I didn't keep them. The rest are done in watercolor. I didn't like working with watercolors until I took this class. Now I love them.

For Color we had to do designs based on time of day using complimentary colors, analogous colors (next to each other on the color wheel) and then one color using different tones. I chose to do ballerinas:


Midnight
Evening
Sunrise

For Form (hard or soft) we did designs for a hypothetical "Star Wars: Episode 256" (I'm totally making up the number as I don't remember what the real one was):

Hard
Soft 



For Texture we had to pick a time period and make three designs using three of the many textures available. I chose the 1880's (I think):


Lace
Stripes

Ruffles
I like my Texture designs so much the are framed and hanging on the wall of my sewing room.