Illustration: Characters

This week long project focused on the creation of characters, although, as typically with Illustration, in perhaps unconventional ways. My favourite way was drawing 3 random shapes in ink, then passing this to someone else and receiving someone else's 3 shapes. We had to select one of the shapes and using the shape as the main form, draw a character. This was passed to someone else again and repeated twice until afterwards we had to give the characters in front of us personality traits. Finally we exchanged sheets again to end up with already formed characters that we had to draw until we knew their design completely, imagining them in different scenarios as well. I loved this way of working as it was incredibly loose and reduced any pressure to immediately come up with an amazing design. When we were given 3 personality traits on Friday and asked to design a character matching them, I found this new way of working great for generating ideas and being a bit different with the designs.

Below are some of my sketchbook pages and character designs from the week.

I love the design of this character - there's so much personality in him just in this one position already (I'm quite annoyed that I didn't design him!)

Given the chance to modify him though I gave him hands to allow better action and lowered his tie below his collar

Nothing harder than trying to make a beaky nose look good in a front view! I took inspiration from Belleville Rendez-vous to help solve it though.

 The Final Colour Test

I wanted his outfit to be as dull as possible so that he could blend into the background, with almost sickly yellow-white skin to show that he often does.

Own Character Design

Personality Traits : Baking, Curvy, Dashing

Luckily it was 'Cake Friday' at college, so there was lots of observational material around. I loved looking at the folds and creases in the cupcake wrappers, which reminded me of old Elizabethan ruffles and the smooth curves of the icing were great to draw.

Initially I was happy with this as my final character design, but I started to find him too static and boring - there was nothing distinctive or unique about him, he looked like a design from Paperchase and he didn't leave any room for actions.

I returned to the ink shapes and this design as the more I looked at him the more his position suggested 'dashing' and his body looked gloppy, like cake mixture.

I really liked the ruffle idea though, so they stayed.

His sticky nature was really fun to play with, particularly on his run.

  
Colour Tests

Just a bit too dark, doesn't suggest cake mixture enough or light heartedness

 Final Choice

Just right! Light beige looks more like traditional cake batter

Overall I found it a great project and a fun week that resulted in some really nice designs and taught me a more natural and inventive way of designing characters that I'll definitely continue to use.

An Evening With Deborah Landis

The other week I got the chance to go to a talk by Deborah Landis at Sheffield Hallam Uni in which she spoke about her recent V&A Hollywood Costume exhibition, but primarily the role of a costume designer for films. While I'd loved the exhibition at the V&A I was worried about feeling a bit out of place at the talk, as I know next to nothing about costume design, but she's one of the best speakers that I've ever been able to listen to. Her enthusiasm for film is incredible and she has a great sense of humour.  I loved the talk as she spent most of it explaining the importance of getting the audience to be a stakeholder in the film and how the best costumes are often the ones that you don't notice as you're immersed in their world so much, rather than talking about the practicalities of design. Costume design is about creating unique individuals each time, but it's also part of making the story come to life. It was a wonderful to hear how she seems to place prominence on helping to create a totally engaging film.

Often during the talk I was surprised though, in particular that the costume designer has to consider the set as well as the costumes so that the two don't clash and that the exhibition took 5 years to curate. Which was understandable as Landis went on to explain that in the Golden Age of cinema the costumes weren't labelled and were handed down to actors, from the leading man in one film, to a supporting actor in another, to then maybe an extra etc, making them hard to locate. In total 130 costumes from 63 lenders were in the exhibition.

The talk was faultless and I enjoyed every minute, that is until the film alarm went off and we all had to exit the building which cut the talk short. However, this meant that I got to meet Deborah Landis outside of the hall and get a photo! (She was lovely and stood outside in the cold signing autographs and having photos with everyone.)

Also, as I found out with Lucy only half way through the talk, Deborah Landis' husband, John Landis the film director, was sat in the audience - in the row behind us! He stood kindly outside in the cold as well and signed an autograph for me!

The talk emphasised to me how important costume design is to a film maker and how unimportant it should be to the audience watching the film. Immersing the audience by creating individuals and worlds on screen is what is key to making incredible films. It helped me to see how costumes should work in films successfully.

Altogether, this was a pretty great day for me.

V&A: Hollywood Costume Exhibition

This was the greatest exhibition that I have ever been to.

Being a film fan I went with the expectation that I would enjoy it, but that it might appeal to lovers of costume design more. I have never been more wrong. 

 

Image from http://www.vandashop.com/Hollywood-Costume-Exhibition-Poster-EVAEX/dp/B009UXALVQ 

The exhibition itself was split into 3 sections: the first dealt more with the script and the transition from this to a costume, looking at areas that have to be considered, like what time period the character is in and their personality and job. Featured here were costumes from Fight Club, The Dude's dressing gown from The Big Lebowski, Charlie Chaplin's Tramp costume (which is tiny!) and Indiana Jones' legendary costume. What was great here was seeing a sketch by Steven Spielberg depicting how he thought Indys' costume should look right next to the actual piece. Plus there were often screens in front of the costumes which showed sections of the relevant script, highlighting sections like when a character trait, motion or costume description were mentioned. I love seeing modern elements in exhibitions - it shows that they're really trying to push the exhibition experience and utilise every possible opportunity. 

The second section was my favourite. It was in two parts, the first looked at the long term collaborations between directors, like Hitchcock, Scorsese and Tim Burton and their costume designers. This involved the use of videos and projections of scripts or notes onto a large table that you could sit around while the directors and costume designers talked. It was an amazing way to hear their opinions straight from them.

The second part dealt with genres really, moving from sci-fi costumes like Darth Vader's (which looks incredibly cheap and almost plastic-y up close) to classic black and white era costumes. I think I learnt the most in this part as I didn't even consider that before colour designers had to think more about pattern, but that too much pattern can be too distracting for the audience. The best area though was the surprising inclusion of an animation section which looked at how motion capture can be used to create 'costumes' like in Avatar or how costumes are actually made for the animators to study (the example there was a costume and model from John Carter), so that they can see how the material might behave. I'd never considered this but it made complete sense, after all the best way to get a sense of something is to observe it. It completely changed my way of thinking about costumes in relation to animation.

The third section was more of a selection of truly iconic costumes, like the Spiderman and Batman suits, Dorothy's dress from The Wizard of Oz and Daniel Radcliffe's Harry Potter Hogwarts costume (so small!). This section really was like a quick trip through cinema history, especially as it was incredibly busy and the V&A was shutting imminently.

The stand out aspect for me though was the ingenious use of layers of coloured paper making up the (often equally iconic) hair styles instead of leaving the mannequins bald or using wigs. I'm not sure if it's been done before, but they were art works themselves. They were so interesting to look at, but they didn't distract from the costumes, rather they helped to complete them and make them feel like they were being worn, not hung.

The down side? Tickets were so limited that we could only get late afternoon tickets and so we only got 1 hour at the exhibition, which wasn't nearly enough time to read all about the costumes, particularly as it was so busy as well. Plus you couldn't take photos, which was a shame.

In the end I left with a totally different view on costume design. It made me realise the amount of work that goes into them, but also the application of them and their importance to the film. If given the chance, I'd probably be content with living in that exhibition surrounded by those costumes. You could feel the work and love that went into it at every stage, so that you left infected with this same sense of joy and enthusiasm. Simply magical.

Hollywood Costume is on at the V&A until the 27th January.