Today was my first Zoom costume painting workshop, hosted by University of North Carolina and the inimitable Rachel Pollock (of https://la-bricoleuse.blogspot.com/ fame). I think we would have had a lot more fun had we been in person together making stuff and touching all the paint samples I have, but it was still nice. Rachel was a wonderful host, and her students were great and asked good questions.

I showed a powerpoint with lots of process shots of different shows and costumes, from Aladdin to Moulin Rouge. In past slide shows, I just showed beautiful finished garments, but in this one I tried to show how we get from some Sharpie-scrawled unitard to a finished beautiful super hero unitard. One example was how Groot from Marvel Universe Live was made from the beginning to-scale drawing to the finished garment. I can’t include all the images here, but I think it would be neat to make a little movie about it. It was such a labor of love and involved a lot of collaboration:

Marvel superhero Groot of “Guardians of the Galaxy” performs in “Marvel Universe Live: Age of Heroes.”

And how to paint scales, feathers, fur, various textures. I did a demo with my little document camera. My colors that I had at home were somewhat limited–black, brown, red and a weird, watery green. So I showed some scales I painted on a real costume, like this Bette Midler mermaid detail:

And then how to paint them with my limited palette on scrap milliskin:

Painting off scale stencils onto milliskin

Showing how to make a flat fabric look rough and textural–again, with a limited palette, but a really good stencil!