labricoleuse: (silk painting)
[personal profile] labricoleuse
The past few days, a contingent of us from the UNC-Chapel Hill graduate program in costume production attended the regional conference for USITT-Southeast.

Regional conferences can be kind of hit-or-miss, depending on how far you have to travel to go to one, who's running it, and how the luck of th programming draw falls. Sometimes the conference turns out better for say, scenic folks than costume folks depending on who they get as guests and presenters. This year was a good one for us, in that we were able to travel to Athens in a university van (so, no travel costs for our students) and one of the guests of honor was renowned Broadway fabric painter Margaret Peot, who also teaches fabric painting at Tisch. [1]

Margaret conducted two workshops on different fabric painting techniques, which i'll be writing up over the next few days, but i thought i'd post a series of images from her own work as a first-look sort of thing. She brought a huge selection of paint samples and gave a talk the first morning on her own career and experiences, kind of like a portfolio presentation, almost, in that it included a slide show full of stage shots, design renderings, and fitting photos of various costumes for which she's done paintwork. Her career has so far spanned from Cats to Spiderman, so it was an incredible array of what amounts to Broadway costume production surface-design history of the past 20 years, really.

Here are a few of the photos i took:

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Left: paint sample for the flying monkeys in Wicked
Right: paint sample for Pinocchio in Shrek: The Musical
You can see finished photos of these costumes on Margaret's website!

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Paint sample for a costume for Disneyworld's Mulan parade

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Paint sample for one of Bette Midler's mermaid costumes
(There's also a finished photo of one of these costumes on Margaret's site.)

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This was a sample i think on silk organza, though it might have been chiffon?
Something sheer that retained its hand beautifully. (Didn't catch the source.)

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Another one i didn't get the source costume credit for, a cool vegetation design.

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A beautiful bird swatch! Love this guy, also don't know the costume for which he was painted.

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I didn't crop the fingers out of this because they help you see how watercolory and blurred-focus the
paint treatment itself intentionally is, as opposed to it being a result of my camera!


And, i also want to congratulate our 3rd year MFA candidates Kaitlin Fara and Claire Fleming, who won awards for their presentations in the graduate student division of the Design/Tech Expo! Only six awards were given to all competing graduate students from the southeastern region, across all areas of technical production (so, also including sets, lights, etc).

Kaitlin won for her draped taffeta gown from Playmakers' production of Big River, designed by Bill Black. Claire won for a millinery research presentation on her technological innovations in the construction of an 18th century hood structure called a calash. Both women will have their admissions paid for attendance at the USITT national conference in the spring (over $200 each!) as their prizes for winning the awards.

I took a couple photos of their setups, so you can see what the winning presentations looked like.

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Calash presentation by Claire Fleming

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Draped gown by Kaitlin Fara

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Full-length shot of the costume on the form in the Expo.


And, not to toot my own horn, but my entry about the inmate prison stripe fabric which we have had digitally printed by Spoonflower for The Parchman Hour won the professional division. Only one professional award was given, so it's a pretty exciting honor, not just for me but for our whole shop and theatre and the world premiere of the play overall!

I've got a lot of pictures from Margaret's workshops to go through and sort, so i'm hoping i'll get those two classes written up soon and posted as well, but that's it for now.

[1] The other two guests of honor were nationally-known lighting guys, so it was also probably a wonderful conference for lighting designers and electricians.
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