Santa Clause 2

I worked on 'Santa Clause 2' (Tim Allen) as a costume illustrator for the designer Ingrid Ferrin. The first film, 'Santa Clause', was designed by April Ferry, and she had done a really wonderful classic Santa Costume with a sort of victorian influence. Ingrid used that as a jumping off point and added certain details like the gold embroidery. I was really excited to work on the costumes for the elves, even more so when she mentioned that she liked the ideas in Carl Larsson's paintings. She ended up using another illustrator for the elves, so I didn't get to work on them. When I saw the sketches, they didn't have any of the charm or apparent influence of Larsson. So maybe for this challenge, I will do my elves. I think that in most films, elves looks creepy or silly, not clever or magical. I never saw 'Santa Clause 2', so I really don't how they turned out in the end.

These two illustrations represent the costumes for the 'good' santa, and the 'evil' santa, which was part of the script. The evil santa had pants that were to be made of really shiny red vinyl to make him look hard and slick as opposed to the warm soft velvet of the good santa. Since costume illustrations are really about the clothing, they are not really 'character' sketches. You can't really pose the figure in a way that obscures the costume, because these are often given to the 'work room' to actually cut the patterns and make the costume. They have to remain pure in that way. Still, I try to get some gesture and personality into the sketch, as much as I can.