The Medicated Gloom

Onto the next one...

The Medicated Gloom is the character who is constantly complaining, she is a hypochondriac and has/had every illness or injury under the sun. It is written into the play that at that point she has a bandage on her knee. It is because of this trait that I decided to portray her with the qualities of a Pigeon. Pigeons are everywhere and everyone can relate to them. They are predominantly dull colours and are constantly cooing, sounding like a constant stream of muttered complaints. I also find that no matter where you go, where ever there are pigeons there will always be one with a bad leg and I thought that added a little humourous twist to this comparison. 

My Inspiration for The Gloom

Body Pose - Lizzie again, and 4B pencil

 Final Design - Front. Done in Watercolour pencils, chalk and pen

 Final Design - Back and Side view

For the side view I used the same template as I used for my Miss H. design because I wanted The Gloom to have the same feeling of being ravaged by age and bent over, which is also why I gave her the stick. I also made the bandage the same colour as her tights to give it the look of the bad legs seen on pigeons. 

Hope you like, thanks again for looking,

Sal XX

The Mirror-Eyed Gazer

Well, I know that I haven't been posting with any regularity at all, but I promise that will all change. I have just re-claimed my work after having it assessed and I wanted to get all the Cagebirds posts out the way so I can move onto the most recent projects. That is what I aim to do now, so this may seem a little rushed and blocky. I apologise!

Right, The Mirror-Eyed Gazer...
As with the other characters in the play her name pretty much sums up her characteristics. She is vain and self-obsessed, often talking about her beauty regime and how she keeps looking young and beautiful. It is for this reason that I decided to base her character on a Peacock. This is an obvious choice I know, but I feel that with this character the more obvious and garish the better. There is a sort of sweeping majesty to a peacock, with it's bright coloured plumage to attract as much attention as possible, and I wanted to include that when I was designing. So I included a lot of the colours found in a peacocks tail feathers but in a highly saturated version, as well as trying to imitate a folded peacock tail in the silhouette.

Peacock used for inspiration

Thanks again to Lizzie for her Body Pose

 Chalk pastel quick drawing of a Peacock to begin to get a sense of colour

 Abstracted drawing of a Peacock Dress, to try and get a feel of character attitude in the most basic form

 Final Design - Side and Back View

Final Design - Full Colour

I like the sweep of colour, and think the eyelashes add a bit of glamour. She is also the only character with a prop specified by the writer, so I added the hand-mirror into the drawing.

Thanks for looking,

Sall XX

The Long Tongued Gossip

Now that the Miss H project is finally finished I can focus all my attention to blogging the Cagebirds project, our 2nd major design project, which I spoke about in my first post. There are 8 characters to design for, each with very specific characteristics. The one I'm looking at here is called The Long-Tongued Gossip and, as the name suggests, she is a gossip. As the play is called Cagebirds it made sense to me to use birds as an inspiration.

For this character I chose to use a Black Palm Cockatoo as a base for a design because it is a bird that is capable of speech or mimicry, which is all gossip is. It also lent itself to a very strong punky or gothic approach to make her stand out and to give her the appearance of being slightly sinister and prickly.

After reading through the text and creating a sort of character profile for each of the 8 ladies or 'birds' I started looking at body poses, getting my friend Lizzie to pose for a series of quick drawings.

 The quick drawing that best embodies The Gossip.

 First design - Acrylic painting of The Gossip and a Black Palm Cockatoo

Final Design - Watercolour pencil, pencil and chalk drawing

Side and Back View Drawing - Marker pen and watercolour pencil drawing.

I liked the idea of her having Killer heels and the Cockatoos plumage has become a huge feature of the design , being more of a representation of the plumage rather than a complete copy of it. The black and red lends itself really well to this secretive, slightly vindictive character and makes her seem sinister and scary in a way. 

I'll keep posting up the character developments as they come,

 TA for looking

Sal XX

If you'd decided not to marry, you'd have saved yourself a lot of heartache...

... And you would've saved me a lot of trouble too!

My dress for Miss Havisham is finally done, apart from a little beading which I plan to do sat watching a film later on today. As my first ever period piece I am rather proud of it, but after all the problems it's given me, I am so very glad to be done with it. Hand in is next week and I'm pretty confident it'll get me a good mark. Well, I hope it will anyway.

It has taken me over 50 hours to create - if you count the many hours pattern cutting, fitting and altering toiles and the few hours it took me to stop crying when I sewed my sleeve on upside down and has cost about £40-50 altogether. But I think it was all well worth it eventually, as it looks pretty much just as I'd hoped in my design

 Final Dress - Full length with train.

 Final Dress - Detail of appliquéd waistband.

Final Design - Aged Character in Watercolours

Now I just have to keep my fingers crossed that it passes :-) and on to the next project...

Ta for looking,

Sal XX

So this is it...

My first ever blog entry, it's not going to be hugely interesting I'll admit. I've decided to try and keep a journal of my first year at real University and the trials and tribulations of the workload I am given, as it says in the description, my first little tiptoes into learning what I have to in order to join a community of designers I am desperately interested in.

Unfortunately I have only thought to do this towards the end of my first project, so throughout the whole of the 3 weeks of designing and the couple of months making the process has been somewhat lost. Don't confuse that with me forgetting what I have already learnt, as this is not the case. I'm just saying that I think that it has interested me greatly and I've already learnt a lot and I'm kind of sad that I haven't catalogued this learning curve. Oh Well.

My newest project I have been working on research and design for about a 3 weeks now and I will continue to do so over the Christmas period. The play I have been looking into is called Cagebirds and was written by  David Campton which is about 6 women, or 'birds' held captive in a 'cage' by The Mistress. A 7th character is added into the cage, The Wild One, who completely shakes up the dynamics of the scene by talking about the notion of escape, causing all the other birds to gather together and murder her, thus restoring their safe and blissful ignorance of the outside world.

Each character has their own main characteristic, making them all seem more like caricatures or stereotypes  rather than multi-dimensional, realistic characters. It is these very specific characteristics that I have picked up on whilst researching, and it will be theses characteristics that help to frame my designs and my interpretation of the characters.