![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labricoleuseIn the spring, i oversaw an independent study course in theatrical footwear topics. My student, Grier Coleman, recently turned in all of her research and projects, and i thought i'd share with the readership her final project, which was to make a pair of "blue-footed booby feet."
This image was one of the primary research images Grier used, a booby doing the famous booby-dance. (This project is excellent on many levels, not the least of which is the chance to use phrases like "booby-dance" in a completely innocent context.)
We talked about how, were one making a complete booby costume, you'd have to take into account the shape of the bird and the gait of a performer--often big walkaround costumes like this that portray short-legged animals with a wide gait will have a "saddle" built into them so that the actor walks around in a sort of sumo crouch. A blue-footed booby costume would probably involve just such a saddle, and thus the width of the foot-splay could get a bit wider than it would if it were being worn by a person walking with a normal human gait.
The base shoes were these clunky platform boots.
Here Grier has used coathanger wire, twine, and a staple-gun to rough out the foot shape.
The "toes" get built up first with some ethafoam pipe insulation tubing.
Buckram provides the base structure for the webbing.
Batting is used to pad out dimension in areas of the feet.
Using soft-sculpture techniques and some blue spandex, the first layer of "skin" goes on.
Still fairly rough, but coming together.
The key in this picture is in that bucket: Sculpt-or-Coat. That's a water-based medium, kind of like acrylic medium or a PVA glue--essentially, a plastic polymer suspended in a water base, which you can paint on with a brush, dries hard to a sandable tough surface. You can build it up in layers and achieve a number of effects, suspend stuff in it, tint it, what have you.
First, Grier did some layers of plain Sculpt-or-Coat as a "primer" over the spandex.
Then she applied wrinkley tissue paper to create the texture of wrinkly booby foot skin.
Lastly, she painted the whole thing over with various shades of acrylic to achieve the distinctive "booby-foot blue."
And, lest you think it's all serious professionalism all the time here, here's a photo from our shoot for the new animal-foot line of Prada shoes:
(Grier's on the left, I'm on the right.)
Grier starts this week as an intern in the costume department and Juilliard in NYC. I'll miss her in classes and working with me on mainstage shows, but i can't wait to see where her career goes from here!
This image was one of the primary research images Grier used, a booby doing the famous booby-dance. (This project is excellent on many levels, not the least of which is the chance to use phrases like "booby-dance" in a completely innocent context.)
We talked about how, were one making a complete booby costume, you'd have to take into account the shape of the bird and the gait of a performer--often big walkaround costumes like this that portray short-legged animals with a wide gait will have a "saddle" built into them so that the actor walks around in a sort of sumo crouch. A blue-footed booby costume would probably involve just such a saddle, and thus the width of the foot-splay could get a bit wider than it would if it were being worn by a person walking with a normal human gait.
The base shoes were these clunky platform boots.
Here Grier has used coathanger wire, twine, and a staple-gun to rough out the foot shape.
The "toes" get built up first with some ethafoam pipe insulation tubing.
Buckram provides the base structure for the webbing.
Batting is used to pad out dimension in areas of the feet.
Using soft-sculpture techniques and some blue spandex, the first layer of "skin" goes on.
Still fairly rough, but coming together.
The key in this picture is in that bucket: Sculpt-or-Coat. That's a water-based medium, kind of like acrylic medium or a PVA glue--essentially, a plastic polymer suspended in a water base, which you can paint on with a brush, dries hard to a sandable tough surface. You can build it up in layers and achieve a number of effects, suspend stuff in it, tint it, what have you.
First, Grier did some layers of plain Sculpt-or-Coat as a "primer" over the spandex.
Then she applied wrinkley tissue paper to create the texture of wrinkly booby foot skin.
Lastly, she painted the whole thing over with various shades of acrylic to achieve the distinctive "booby-foot blue."
And, lest you think it's all serious professionalism all the time here, here's a photo from our shoot for the new animal-foot line of Prada shoes:
(Grier's on the left, I'm on the right.)
Grier starts this week as an intern in the costume department and Juilliard in NYC. I'll miss her in classes and working with me on mainstage shows, but i can't wait to see where her career goes from here!
