Costume Design - Sweeney Todd

In a previous post I shared some designs I did in costume design class in college. In continuing with that here are some other designs I've done.

In this portion of the class they had a graduate student come in as the director. They picked out a play and we worked with them just like a costume designer would. We discussed their vision and how they wanted the show to look.

This is 'Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street':

Sweeney

Mrs. Lovett

Judge Turpin

 

Johanna

Anthony

Tobias

Beggar Woman

I had a lot of fun making the clothes look dingy. I added ink to the watercolors and it was awesome.

I tried to tie all the costumes together with a hint of red (to reference the bloodiness of the show).

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.

Wedding Singer - Shiny Dirndls

One of the few well planned out costumes for Wedding Singer were the waitress uniforms for Julia and Holly (the script actually calls for a third waitress, but we cut the part and gave her line to a wedding guest). I found this picture online while researching 80's costume ideas:

So, I drafted (for the first time since college) what I wanted to do for the waitress uniforms:

In the end I decided to go with fuller skirts because of movement. I made black satin skirts with a wide elastic waistband. Sewing onto the elastic was tricky and I did it wrong - I used a zigzag stitch which didn't work out wonderfully because the zigzag function on my sewing machine isn't working right. After some research I now know how to do it right (double needle) to avoid stretch issues the next time.

The director thought we should have different colors for the different waitress so Julia's is gold and Holly's is pink (I also bought a turquoise for the 3rd waitress - I still have the fabric).