Thursday, November 28, 2013

Inspired Coords Part II: Non-Characters

Continued from last week's post, I have a third media-inspired coord type to show you.

Type 3: A non-character or setting

If you're doing this one, you clearly like a challenge.

This is, simply put, the hardest way you can take inspiration from media. Whether you take your inspiration from a culture or from a setting, you're taking a broader base of impression and trying to distill it into a single outfit. For example, while many people will say that the setting of a book “becomes a character,” you’ve got to admit that it’s hard to translate that setting into human form.

However, it can be done.

My favorite texts for this are works like Palimpsest by Catherynne Valente and Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. Each of these offers dreamlike descriptions of places, not concrete but very vivid. They give a wealth of images, colors, and textures that can be translated easily to fabrics and jewelry.

Thursday, November 21, 2013

Inspired Coords Part I: Characters

I'm back! After doing the play and having the kids ask me to come to their concerts the next week, I'm finally back on the blogging train. And all the costuming I've been doing has given me ideas.

Inspiration for Lolita coords comes from everywhere, but it can sometimes be hard to figure out how to take that inspiration and translate it into a completed coord. And, since I like a good challenge and am hot off the heels of taking a script and making written characters a reality, I'm going to take on media-inspired coords.

I'll be covering three different types of outfit inspiration over the course of two posts:
  1. Characters that are already visually represented
  2. Characters that are not visually represented
  3. Non-characters
The first two will be in this post, and the final type will be given its own post.

Let's get started, shall we?