Press Call at the Portrait Gallery

Now that things are revving up for the ECA fashion/costume/textiles show, it's all starting to feel a lot more real. Graduation is imminent! There are only three weeks left to do ev er y thing!!

Part of the lead-up to the show was a press call which took place day before yesterday. All graduating costume designers (post and undergrad both) took one costume to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery where they were modeled for invited press. The location was stunning and some really lovely shots of some of the costumes ended up in the papers and there was a nice little segment on STV as well.

I was rather excited to see my fairytale wedding dress for The Girl in the Edinburgh Evening News the next day!

If you're in Scotland at the end of the month you can still get tickets to the catwalk show, which will be April 23-25. The fashion design portion of the show is quite interesting as well, but let's be real. Costume is where it's at. ;) And there will be some seriously amazing work on display... everyone's stuff is so different and exciting!

I took some of my own pictures on my iphone at the press call... I only wish I had had a better camera with me to capture it with!

An end is in sight

Contrary to what the utter lack of posting lately has indicated, I have in fact been very very busy making and designing things. That said, I very much do NOT recommend going through a bad depressive episode during grad school. That way lies misery, guilt, and sorrow. However, thanks to the wonders of modern medicine, I have been able to pick myself up these past couple months and have made real progress towards my final MFA degree show.

Naturally, however, the catwalk show which occurs before the degree show is only four weeks away and there is still SO MUCH to finish! With depression somewhat subdued, I am no longer spending my days struggling to get out of bed, but instead spending my days convincing myself that I don't need to pick up a million new hobbies and projects immediately...

After May I can sew for myself and pick up tablet weaving and make all the bath bombs and perfumes and incenses that I like (and post some of the many, MANY blog posts I have already planned and sort of drafted). For now I have a design book to finish, and a hussar inspired Queen and an 1820s Devil to make.

Til then, here are a few pictures I snapped behind the scenes at a recent photoshoot (for show promo etc.). I had chosen two costumes in the photoshoot, both of the same main character from my story The Girl Without Hands. My two lovely models, Poppy and Charlotte, are both undergraduates in the Performance Costume programme at ECA. I can't wait to post some of the resulting official photos later... they turned out beautifully!

in the sketchbook

Since I'm currrently off Learning And Looking At Things in Germany, I figured that it might be a good time to post some of the sketches I did for various 'Girl Without Hands' characters. Most of these are just my initial impressions/ideas and most likely will not really resemble the final designs/illustrations much at all, but at least it shows a bit of what's been tumbling around in my head.  For working out ideas I like to scan pencil drawings into the computer and then mess around with color in photoshop... though I don't think I'll use this sort of technique for the final illustrations.

And tomorrow I get to look at original 19th century pieces of German folk costume... so hopefully I'll soon have a bunch of new research to incorporate!

Silver Hands

A slight change of pace today.  As the name itself implies, The Girl Without Hands features a main character who looses her hands (through a foolish deal with the Devil that her father made).  A little later on she receives silver hands to wear... eventually getting real, human hands again thanks to her goodness and the kindness of an angel.  I'm thinking of turning the angel into a female scientist in my rendition of the tale, but that's really by the by.  What really matters right now is that I'm planning on creating silver hands as part of the overall costuming.

I've spent some time looking at 19th century prosthetics, as well as metalwork from the 18th and 19th centuries plus some pieces of contemporary haute couture which thematically works.

I love this utterly creepy Victorian prosthetic arm.  I don't believe I want to make on myself that is articulated, but I still am fascinated by this piece.

At the moment I'm looking at a couple different techniques for making the hands, although it'll probably be a little while until I can get into the metals studio and try them out.  I'm interesting in trying both electroplating and electrotyping to create metal hands based upon life-molds taken from the model (whoever that turns out to be).

Electroplating permanently bonds a coating of metal to whatever it is you've properly treated and immersed in the chemical bath, while electrotyping adheres to the agent itself and creates a copy from a mold.  Since I want to create metal hands that are essentially wearable in glove-like fashion, whatever it is I make will have to be hollow.  Electrotyping seems like it would be an ideal solution in this instance, although the technique was maining popular during the Victorian era.  To create something like that through electroplating, I believe I would have to create a cast of the model's hand and arm out of wax, which I could then coat in metal using the electroplating after which I would melt the wax out.

I have no idea yet which techinque might be more appropriate or yield better results... if I want to do raised relief decoration on the silver hands (which I would like to do), it seems as if doing that on a wax cast would be the easiest way.  But I think I won't know until I get in the studio and actually try it all out.

Or I could do a combination of metalwork and stitchery... like these killer shoes by Alexander McQueen.

The Girl Without Hands - Mädchen ohne Hände

 Beautiful illustration by Winona Nelson

When thinking about what I wanted to do for my master's project, it made the most sense to follow through on the themes I've been more or less obsessed with for the last few years: dark fairytales, Germany, and the early 19th century.

The university library fortunately had facsimile versions of the orignal publications by the Brothers Grimm; both the first editions published in 1812 and 1815 (the latter being a follow-up of 'new' and different stories), and the last and most famous edition from 1857.  The first couple editions apparently weren't wildly successful, but after the third edition (which included all the tales from the first two) was published in 1819, the book started to garner a following and eventually became as well-known as it is today.

Title page of the first edition of Grimms' Fairytales or more properly, Kinder und Hausmärchen.

After reading through the original text, I eventually decided to design for the tale, The Girl Without Hands.  This story is not nearly as well known as other Grimm tales, perhaps because in spite of a happy ending, it is at it's core rather gruesome and phsycologically horrific.  It also was the only story to spark a strong visceral reaction when I was reading... that is, when I was reading it in German.  The next day I read a few English translations which were unbearably formal and stiff, perhaps providing another reason for it's lack of fame.

Regarding the costume design, I have decided to set the story in an alternate version of Germany shortly after the release of the compiled third edition of Kinder und Hausmärchen in 1819.  I'm looking at a lot of 19th century traditional German costume (or Tracht, as it's officially called) plus court dress and everyday wear of German royalty and nobility during the early 1820s.