Character Development

I was asked to design costumes for characters in a play which took place in two parallel universes: 1) Ohio in 1995, and 2) a fantasy world called Newlandia that existed within a “Dungeons and Dragons” game. I needed to design a costume for each character in both worlds. To start, I created a mood board for each character based on their personality, age, and setting. I researched 1995 yearbooks, snapshots of memorable outfits I had seen in magazines, and swatches of color. In my final sketches, I did not want to depict the characters as static, but aimed to create movement to accentuate the costumes. I represented the Newlandia characters as strong but feminine by drawing each of them in a different ballet pose. I designed the 1995 costumes to be simple, rather than overly dramatic, because the characters needed to be believable as teenagers during that time period. Each of the final six pieces, with fabric swatches, were done on 11"x15" paper.