Costume Design

Like scenic designers, costume designers sometimes create sketches and renderings of their designs to help the director and other members of the design team visualize the final product and help the costume shop supervisor and construction crew achieve that product.

In the case of the Appalachian State production of Still Life with Iris, designer Sue Williams chose a different approach. Instead of drawing the costumes as she wanted them to look in their final form, she created a collage board that showed the colors, textures, and shapes she wanted for the costumes of the various groups of characters. With this collage board, she was able to convey the fundamental characteristics of the costumes, while still leaving a lot of room for creativity and invention during the construction process. This approach was particularly well-suited to this production of Still Life with Iris because none of the costumes were scheduled to be built from scratch--instead, they were all made by altering (in some cases quite radically) costumes that the department already had in storage. The images below are three parts of Sue William's collage board, each containing fabric swatches and abstracted figures representing characters that appear in various scenes of the play.