Wednesday Nights, Lisa, Richard

more sketches from class. Lisa brings her great combo of outfits. Richard plays guitar and always inspires great drawings.

Pro Bono for the CDG

These are some illustrations for postcards that I did for the Costume Designers Guild. We made some for the last union convention, and so we are doing it again. Members submit illustrations, and they are voted on at the membership meeting. This year, illustrators and designers in the CDG were encouraged to collaborate. The theme is Florida (the convention is in Orlando this year) and we were asked to include the union logo in the design somehow. I did the bathing beauties with Joanna Johnston, and the Seminole woman with Hope Hanafin. It was fun! I used the bathing beauties piece to practice working in Corel Painter, and the other is traditional watercolor. The Bathing Beauties were voted in, and the Seminole came close, and may be included if they decide to print more than four selections. You can see all the entries soon at the CDG web site, www.costumedesignersguild.com

Wednesday Nights

some drawing that I snuck in during my Wednesday night figure drawing class, great models Lisa and Oksana.

Some Recent Projects

I did these illustrations for Costume Designer Jacqueline West as representations of her designs for "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button". Some of them were used in a promotional piece about the costumes for the Paramount film. I did them last year, but couldn't show them until after the film was released.

Winter 2009

Happy New Year! I sat in on the Costume Figure Drawing Class in December (the last night of the semester I think). I usually teach this class, but took a semester off from it. Mark Michelon was in charge and doing a great job. Our former student Oksana modeled. She is Russian, and wore this little fur hat that I gave her for fun. She is wonderful model, loves clothes, and is now a costume illustrator. I start teaching this class again in February. Looking forward to it, but I can't sit and draw when I am teaching . . .

Iron Man

I spent a couple of weeks doing costume illustrations on Iron Man for designers Laura Jean Shannon and Rebecca Bentjen. No, I did NOT work on the Iron Man suit. I sketched and painted gowns mostly, for Pepper Potts, Gwyneth Paltrow's character. I haven't seen the film yet, but will soon. So I don't know if any of these designs made it onto the screen (all the gowns were for one scene). Often they don't, they get changed somewhere down the line. The sketches are used to present ideas to the director and the actors, sometimes, and then if they don't change, they are given to 'the workroom' to build. I am sure I don't have a credit on the film either, because it is really difficult to get an on screen credit for costume illustration. Producers often only allow each department on a film a certain number of credits, and costume designers and other dept heads have to choose who to cut from the list (a lousy job!). Since the illustrator often will only work a few weeks (as was the case for me on Iron Man) compared to other crew members that work dawn to midnight for months dragging costumes around, we usually get cut. It is a shame, since the work of the illustrator can play a big role in the costume design process. I have managed to get a few screen credits for costume illustration due to the perseverance of designer Joanna Johnston. Storyboarding credits are more common for me.

Other news with me: I did some boards for "Jennifer's Body" directed by Karyn Kusama (Aeon Flux, Girl Fight) and written by Diablo Cody (Juno), and for another film "Peacock" directed and written by Michael Lander (a newbie). They are both really interesting projects, in production now, and I look forward to seeing them. Currently I am doing some more boarding and prop work for "MadMen" on Showtime.

The Real Santa

Here is the sketch I did of Santa for Joanna Johnston on the Polar Express, and also a photo of a bunch of the crew (I am in the red skirt) posing with Tom Hanks, in full costume, as Santa. He looked beautiful! It almost made you cry. The design was based on the same research that we did for the reindeer stuff (Santa was designed first, in fact), and we started in the sketch to keep him a little chubby. Joanna knew that the 'American' Santa is usually sort of round, and was afraid to scare people off by deviating from that (she is British, and they don't think of him as necessarily fat), but we were all glad when they decided to go with a Santa in the proportions of Chris Van Allsburg's Santa from the book. He is a noble, grand, figure, very fatherly, with a deep voice. Larger than life. My favorite in the film.

Beloved Costume Illustration

This was done with Collen Atwood, designer on "Beloved". It is watercolor, with a little bit of prismacolor pencil.

Costume Illustration from "The Polar Express"

I did this with Joanna Johnston, the costume designer on the film (The Polar Express).