Costume; Skills Week

I was really excited to start the costume section of the course because that had been the part which I’d been waiting to do since September. I’ve been completely fascinated by costumes for as long as I can remember and I know that I want to go on to do costume design in the future so I’m excited to start this course.

The first week of the costume course was a skills week which was centred around the two characters; Miss Havisham and the White witch. I chose to do Miss Havisham because I have never read great expectations I think that this is a good opportunity to do some research into something that I know nothing about rather than looking at the White witch, who’s character I already know to an extent.

The first thing I did was look at extracts from the book and descriptions of the character. I also watch the film so I could get an idea of the storyline as I didn’t have time to read the whole book since this project is a week long. I then made a series of mind maps to get to understand the character and I discovered that her main character traits are that she wants revenge she is becoming withered and that she is stuck in time. Her character is also centred around the theme of Decay.

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I then began to look at the character from a visual point of view. I looked at previous examples of the costume from various old films and also the old illustrations from the original book. I then created my own mood board from images of Victorian wedding dresses and also decayed textures. I have tried to link all of the images on my mood board by drawing over them in pen. I have drawn the dress shapes over the textures and I have extended some of the decaying leaves shapes over the wedding dresses. From my mood but I can see that I would like to include elements of decay in the shapes and textures of the fabric paired with the styling of a Victorian wedding dress for a well off lady in the Victorian era. I have also included this image of Queen Victoria because she is supposedly the woman who brought back white wedding dresses, and I think that she is someone who a young Miss Havisham would look up to.

During the week we had to do a library task where we were given an image and had to research different elements of it to try and determine the source of the image. I thought this was really fun as I really enjoyed researching it, and I was also happy that I managed to trace exact image and get the year that was taken to almost exactly between 1900-1902.

These studies are all from different views of objects that we were given to draw in different ways. This was to experiment with different textures and styles of drawing and to generate ideas that we could put into our textiles and costumes.

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These are some of the samples that I produced during this week which combine fine fabrics that would be used in a wedding dress with fabric distressing techniques. I think that this would accurately represent the character.

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I also chose to look at how the costume would be changed for theatre as opposed to film. The costumes here are all from various theatre productions, with most of them being from great expectations. The first major difference I have noticed about Miss Havisham’s costume is that it is a lot less white and much more grey and brown with a greater variety of tones within it. I would imagine that this is because the stage lights reflect off it far too much, making it look far too white making her appear too bright for her character. Different, darker colours are also more easily seen by the audience. You can also get away with less detailed and more gestural costumes for theatre, as you just don’t see the same level of detail as a film camera captures.

I took the drawing I did of the character and I put it into photo shop and added the textures from the samples that I have made previously into the costume to give a more realistic idea of how it would look.

I’m fairly happy with the outcome, although I would have liked to develop the idea further, this wasn’t possible due to the time constraints of it being only a week-long project. I might come back to it at a later date however. Overall, I have really enjoyed the first week of costume and I have loved researching and designing for the character, much more than the textiles aspect of it, so I think I will try and focus on my future projects more on design and character development, rather than on the actual fabric and making although I do enjoy this as well. I am really looking forward to expanding the range of characters, scripts and books that I have a knowledge of, and developing my design style further.