There's a second part to the surface design adventures of Jen Caprio's costume design for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat: hand-painted appliques! (The first part of the process, the digital textile design of the collection of twelve background fabrics, was described in this prior post hereRecall if you will Jen's design for the coat, ( Read more... )

So, i've been working on a pretty exciting extracurricular project lately, for my friend and colleague, costume designer Jennifer Caprio. I've worked on several shows for Playmakers with Jen, including the currently-running Private Lives, for which we painted that fantastic Schiaparelli-inspired silk crepeBut, clearly as a successful and nationally ( Read more... )

My masks and armor class has presented their simple masks. These are defined as masks which typically don't require a life-cast of the performer's face to create, and which don't fully enclose the head or require special engineering (like a movable jaw or something). For these projects, students often choose mask designs inspired by traditions like ( Read more... )

One of the capstone projects of the third year in our graduate program is the historical reproductions. Students choose a garment from our historical clothing archive, CoStar, which they meticulously examine, research its provenance, and reproduce as accurately as possible. They write a paper on their findings, digitize the pattern, and make it ( Read more... )

This semester, the topic of my class is Masks and Armor, and my students have just turned in the first of their projects, maquettes! Maquettes are small-scale 3D sculptures of mask designs, and the first step in working with a costume designer on the making of a mask--it allows the crafts artisan to take an initial stab at translating the designer' ( Read more... )

We've begun fielding phone calls and emails from prospective applicants to our graduate program for Fall 2014, and it reminds me that I ought to make my yearly round of links to my prior posts on applying to graduate school ( Read more... )

Recall if you will the super-exciting project we have in the works, the creation of custom silk crepe for our upcoming production of Private Lives at Playmakers Repertory Company.

I wrote the first post a while back, about the sample-creation process in which we determined techniques and media to use to get the results our designer, Jennifer ( Read more... )

In Part One of this series on some hand-painted silk we are making, i got as far as the sample process, in which my assistant and i created a whole range of surface design swatches to show our designer, Jennifer Caprio, how we might create the fabric. Once Jen chose the sample, our next task was to get the image onto the fabric, a rich 4-ply silk ( Read more... )

The semester has finally ended, and here are some images of the final round of projects from Costume Director Judy Adamson's period pattern class in 19th century women's attire.

( Read more... )

Completely and totally off-topic post, but this is a recipe i created and felt might be good to share with the world.

See, one of my hobbies is experimental baking. I've been trying out a few vegan cookie recipes of late because one of my coworkers is vegan, and this one turned out so well that i thought i'd put it on the internet ( Read more... )