In my little corner

The large majority of my time these days is spent in my little corner of the room for the performance costume 4th years and masters students (of which there are two), trying to make up for an unfortunate lack of real productivity earlier this semester.  At the moment I have quite a lot of projects 'in progress', and am slowly chipping away at the list of things to get done.

First priority for the rest of the semester is finishing all the final costume illustrations for The Girl Without Hands.  I've decided to do them on illustration board, and start with a pencil drawing which then gets set with fixative and varnished so that I can paint on top.  I just do a simple wash of acrylic to tone the board, and then use thin layers of oil paint on top.

(this one was sort of at the half-way point here)

I've also started mocking up and making costumes for the main character, and am aiming on having three toiles and at least one finished final costume by the turn in date in May.  In spite of not having masses of time at my disposal, I'm still doing quite a bit of hand stitching on the final pieces... such as the shift currently on the stand.  After all, there's nothing quite like focusing on hand work for some quality stress relief!

I can't believe March is half over already. Ridiculous.

So I guess I've been kind of MIA online lately, but it turns out that dealing with illness and some personal issues while trying not to fall too far behind on grad school work means that something or another was going to have to fall by the wayside.  And that was pretty much most of the internet. (aside from tumblr which for me mostly consists of reblogging fandom or feminist stuff.  and cat pictures.)  So massive apologies if I haven't responded to emails… if you've messaged me, I haven't forgotten about you! Promise!

That said, I've got a lot stored up to talk about… still tons of images and research from the Germany trip, as well as epic fabric shopping in London, and of course what I've been working on in the studio for the past month or two.

'Til then, I'll leave you with some little sketches from when I was working out ideas for a couple costumes before committing to final illustrations.