Cant draw - wont draw

Well that's not completely true but I have found some interesting methods to help in the creation of line drawings. Every designer wants to find ways of saving time and as the most important aspect of design is the the content the drawing side of things is the most obvious place to look for time saving techniques. I have found that by combining analogue sketching with digital enhancement this process is easily achieved.

You can see from the 2 figure above some on this processes. The first figure shows a quick line drawing of a figure which has been sketched and scanned in. The second image shows a much more refined and well proportioned image. The computer was used to clean up the original picture, re-size and remove any elements of the image which has not worked. The leg was reworked as what the right arm which did not sit right on the body. The image was then printed and worked on before scanning and putting back into Photoshop, where the final image was cleaned up and printed on brown paper ready to be hand painted. You might say what go through the process of using the computer. well. Firstly one does not need to be too precious about the original drawing, using a rubber I was able to try a number of options before coming the final design choice. Lastly as the final image is saved in the computer if there are changes to the drawing this image can be edited and printed again.

Hamlet - Research Aim

In December 08 I was asked to design the costumes for the Brown-Sea Island Open Air Theatre's (BOAT) production of Hamlet. I saw this as a great opportunity to further investigate my research topic by considering the combination of analogue and digital process when rendering costume designs. I wanted to explore the potential of combing traditional painting and drawing techniques with digital scanning, editing and image manipulation.

The director wanted a traditional look to the costumes setting the production in its original setting in the 14th Century. Though I was not overly excited by the concept to start with, as it seemed safe and conventional, as I started to read the text and breakdown the production I became more inspired. Using the traditional silhouette and cut of the period I wanted to develop my illustration style. My past explorations of different rendering style had focused on CAD techniques which at times had resulted in different looks, some of which had a strong digital feel. For this project I wanted to focus on my hand painting which I hope it would be a complimentary style for the production.

Also I wanted to record the any tricks along the way which helped the illustration process and whether these could be incorporated into my teaching and benefit my students. Also I will work with a c0llegue from AIB who is interested, for her research, in developing CAD and lazar cutting techniques for textiles - the result of which will be interesting to record. The following entries will focus a great deal on recording rendering techniques.

Mary Barton at the AIB

I have not written for a while but in the time since the last post I was asked to revisit my designs for Mary Barton which I originally designed for the Arts Educational School as part of my M.A. research. Now the AIB has an acting department from time-to-time the costume staff are asked to design the shows for the student actors. In this case I re-visited the costume design from the ArtsEd production and re-looked at them for their appropriateness for the AIB. Rebecca (the original set designer for the ArtsEd productions) was also asked to re-visit her set design and rework it for the AIB studio space.

After some consideration I decided that the original designs did not need that much work as the director’s vision was very similar to the original production and the set design had limited changes made to it. However, in the original production I had not designed all the characters due to time limitation and also because these characters were generally pulled from the ArtsEd store. Therefore, I needed to look at these characters and re-visit my research to complete the collection of designs. As I had saved the designs on the computer is able to re-print the design for the costume supervisor to work from and also use the original template for the additional design. A student, as part of their own project work, become my design assistant and designed 6 of the additional 9 characters. He chose to render the images using the similar digital drawing technique which I had used. Seeing the style and equipment used in a different way produced fascinating results. Though the designs had a similar feel and sat will with my original ones, the students own drawing techniques were imposed onto the designs. Knowing the students previous work it was encouraging to see that the digital drawing technique enhanced his drawing style and the images communicated well.

Another very different angle to observe the realisation of my designs, was that in this production 4 of the costumes were being made, where in the original production most of the costumes were sources or hired. The image above shows and example of this. The costumes were to be made by 4 costume students and it was a pleasure working with them in this capacity. I observed early on that the designs were perhaps not clear enough for this process. As I knew in the original production that the costumes would be hired or sources, I spent more time trying to incorporate the feel and atmosphere of the play into the designs and though the designs were well considered they were more of a suggestion rather the communication of specific design specification. Once the costume started getting constructed it became clear that I needed to clarify things about my design decisions. This confirms my comment which I make in my Thesis that a designer must consider how the production will be realised when taking into account the style in which they will render the designs. In this situation I could have taken advantage of the digital platform and work on the digital drawings to clarify some detail in the costume designs. However, I must admit that I did not do this, choosing instead to discuss options with the costume makers verbally. On a positive note the illustrative style of the designs did allow for the costume makers to interpret the design and offer creative input into the process, something which I whole-heartily encourage. The next step would be to ask the costume makers their reflection on what it was like to work with the designs . I will have to see what their response to this is.











The production was a real success from an acting and costume point of view. I think it had the right period feel with the correct ammount of theatricallity.