First costume renderings

For my theater-design course (TA 31 at Cabrillo), my next assignment is to create costume renderings (with certain constraints). Because I have never done a costume rendering before and never used water colors (the suggested method), I decided to do a practice run over the weekend, doing some costume renderings for Falstaff, Bardolph, Pistol, and Mistsress Quickly, based on the technique that Skip Epperson demonstrated in class. This consists of

• starting with a costume design template printed on copier paper,
• putting soft pencil on the back,
• going over the figure with a hard pencil to transfer the image to Bristol board,
• drawing the costume on the Bristol board, using the graphite lines as guides,
• coloring the costume and figure to add 3D and show the colors of the costume.

I found line drawings of figures on the web.  The female figure is from tracingrealbodymodels.org, which is gone from the net, but I found it archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20180514103200/https://tracingrealbodymodels.org/ (I picked one of the poses for Phoenix).  The male figures are from freepik.com (https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/hand-drawn-human-body-outline-illustration_49268308.htm for Pistol, https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/hand-drawn-human-body-outline-illustration_49669611.htm for Bardolph, and https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/hand-drawn-human-body-outline-illustration_49669609.htm for Falstaff). I used inkscape to widen Falstaff further.

I did Mistress Quickly first, using some old tubes of water color paint that my wife had (at least 20 years old).  Unfortunately some of them had dried up and some had separated, so they were a bit of a pain to work with.  I also had a lot of trouble controlling the brush, as I sometimes get shaky hands when I try to do fine work.

Here is the rendition of Mistress Quickly’s costume. (click on it of a higher-resolution image.)

I forget in what order I drew the men, but I did them with water-color pencils, instead of water color paint, and I found the pencils much easier to work with.

I made Bardolph be a bit weedy and old-fashioned with clothes not very different from what I might have worn in the early 1970s (well, not the shoes).

Pistol I made a bit more muscular and dressed him in cycling clothes. I didn’t notice the stance of his feet when I was doing the costume, so the bulge of his “package” is on the wrong side.

Falstaff’s costume is perhaps the least successful, not in terms of the rendering, but in failing to establish that he is the main character. I made him dress in a bit more formal register than the others, but I don’t think that is enough.

All the characters share a red-blue-and-white color scheme, with stripes for everyone but Falstaff.  Perhaps he should have  striped suit?

The tube water colors are more saturated than the pencils, though I may be able to get more intense colors from the pencils by using more shading.  I might also try using a mix of pencils and tube colors, if I can open the tubes for the colors I want to use and get any paint out of them.