Character Costume Figure Drawing

Step-by-Step Drawing Methods for Theatre Costume Designers

Tan Huaixiang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315452357
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Character Costume Figure Drawing is an essential guide that will improve your drawing skills and costume renderings. Step-by-step visuals illustrate the how-tos of drawing body parts, costumes, accessories, faces, children, and different character archetypes, such as maternal, elderly, sassy, sexy, and evil. By focusing on the foundations of drawing bodies, including body proportion, bone structure, body masses, facial expressions, and appendages, this guide shows you how to develop sketches from stick figures to full-blown characters.

The third edition features a new chapter, Digital Mixed Media Costume Rendering. This chapter introduces the basic usages of Photoshop tools to enhance and improve costume designs, in order to provide easy delivery design ideas to the director and design team, provide easy changes and alterations during the design process, virtually apply actual fabric swatches over costume sketches, and help visualize lighting effects.

1

Drawing the Figure

My objective in writing this book is to show how to draw figures using a simple and easy drawing method. Specifically, the book is intended to help theatre students improve their drawing skills so that they can give effective design presentations. Most theatre students do not have any solid drawing training, or any human anatomy or figure-drawing courses in their curricula. Drawing requires a lot of practice and knowledge of the proportions of the human body. I believe that with effort, anybody can draw.

Theatre students typically have to do production assignments and work in the shops, helping to build either scenery or costumes for the production. Their time is occupied with those assignments, leaving them little time to improve their drawing skills. That is why I am trying to find a short, easy, and fast way to help them improve their drawing abilities. The methods in this book can be used without a model. However, if theatre students have the opportunity to draw the human figure from live models, they should do so. Drawing live models is a tremendous help in understanding the human body.

PROPORTIONS OF THE BODY

There are many concepts or methods for measuring the divisions of the human body. The eight-heads-tall figure proportion method is often used by artists or fashion illustrators. Some fashion drawings may use eight-and-a-half- or nine-heads-tall figures to demonstrate the garments, using a slim, sophisticated image. Realism is not the intent of fashion designers or illustrators. Rather, their objective is to create a stylized or exaggerated version of reality, which today is a tall, slim, and athletic figure, with a long neck and long legs. Fashion illustrations emphasize the current ideals or trends of fashion beauty. The thin body and specific poses are designed to enhance the garments. Fashion illustrators are creating the images of fashionable products to stimulate customers to purchase the garments. Beautiful illustrations can impress and influence customers to buy and wear the advertised clothing.

Costume designs for theatrical productions are quite different from fashion illustrations. The costume designer uses the history of fashion as a reference for creating costumes for many varieties of characters or groups of characters in plays. The characters are everyday-life people: young or old, thin or heavy, short or tall, with different nationalities and particular personalities. Costume design for productions requires creating practical garments that are going to be worn on stage by believable characters who have well-defined personalities. Sometimes a well-defined character costume design can inspire the actors and enhance the design presentation for the production team. In my drawings and designs, I try to emphasize a realistic style of body proportions, but I use slightly exaggerated facial features and body language to create characters with personality. The real creative challenge is how to express personalities of characters.

Most of the proportions of the body that I used in this book are based on the theories of proportions used in many other art books. There are fantastic art books from which you can learn about the proportions of the body and about figure drawing techniques, such as Bridgman’s Complete Guide to Drawing from Life, by George B. Bridgman (Sterling, 2001); The Complete Book of Fashion Illustration, by Sharon Lee Tate and Mona Shafer Edwards (Prentice Hall, 1995); The Human Figure: An Anatomy for Artists, by David K. Rubins (Penguin, 1975); Drawing the Head and Figure, by Jack Hamm (Perigee, 1982); and Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, by Betty Edwards (Tarcher, rev. ed. 1999). These books helped me improve my understanding of the human body and taught me how to present the body well. You can study the rules and principles of figure drawing, but you have to learn how to use them through practice.

To give my characters a realistic appearance, I slightly change the size of the head. Compared to the eight-heads-tall proportions, I enlarge the head to extend outside the usual boundary of the first head area. This enlarges the head in proportion to the top half of the body. I keep the feet within the bottom-half portion of the body. When I start the foundation of a figure, however, I still start with the eight-heads-tall method because it is an even number and easier to divide for calculation purposes. My divisions on the body may differ from other books, but the measurements work for my figure drawings. My primary intent is to have a system that is easy to use.

The key for developing a character figure drawing that is in proportion is to keep the top half (from the crotch up to the top of the skull) equal to the bottom half (from the crotch down to the bottom of the feet). The crotch is the main division point. The head can...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Drawing the Figure
• Chapter 2 Creating the Face
• Chapter 3 Figure and Facial Variations
• Chapter 4 Hands, Feet, and Accessories
• Chapter 5 Character Costume Design Creation
• Chapter 6 Rendering Techniques
• Chapter 7 Character Costume Figures in Style
• Chapter 8 Digital Mixed Media Costume Rendering
• Chapter 9 Costume Rendering Gallery
• Index