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The Art of Faux : The Complete Sourcebook of Decorative Painted Finishes

Secrets of Eskimo Skin Sewing

The Costume Designer's Handbook : A Complete Guide for Amateur and Professional Costume Designers

The Costume Technician's Handbook : A Complete Guide for Amateur and Professional Costume Technicians

Costume Design : Techniques of Modern Masters The Costume Technician's Handbook 3/e

Costume Design 101 : The Art and Business of Costume Design for Film and Television

Clean It Fast, Clean It Right : The Ultimate Guide to Making Absolutely Everything You Own Sparkle and Shine

Stage Costume Step-By-Step : The Complete Guide to Designing and Making Stage Costumes for All Major Drama Periods and Genres

Period Costume for Stage & Screen : Patterns for Women's Dress, 1800-1909

Costume Construction

Costumes and Chemistry : A Comprehensive Guide to Materials and Applications

The Figure : An Approach to Drawing and Construction

Draw Fashion Models! (Discover Drawing)

Waisted efforts : an illustrated guide to corset making

Instant Period Costume : How to Make Classic Costumes from Cast-Off Clothing

Fashion a La Mode : The Pop-Up History of Costumes and Dresses

Period Costume for Stage & Screen : Patterns for Women's Dress, Medieval-1500  

Click here to see some of my Notebook Pages

SCRAPBOOKS: This is for all those ideas you see in magazines and the paper that you want to stick on your bulletin board but don't have the room. Buy a cheap "magnetic" page album, cut out the pictures, and stick them in. Then when you need a creative idea to steal (sorry, "adapt") you just flip through your albums and look for something appropriate. It need not be a picture of a costume, just pictures that give you ideas: anything from nature photographs to modern art.

IDEA BOXES: Same idea only three dimensional. Bill Jones of San Francisco State used to require his design class to bring in an "object-of-the-week" that they found, to give the other students ideas. People brought in interesting leaves, nuts and garbage: rusted objects, colored scrap papers and so forth. In an optimum situation you will turn your whole home and work place into giant idea boxes filled with objects and pictures that creatively inspire you. I myself have done this with my apartment, and a student who saw it was so inspired by it she designed a stage set for Dusa, Fish, Stas, and Vi based on it. Milla, a Russian designer friend of mine, collected so many fun metal objects that she found inspiring, she tied them all to strings on a lamp, and now has a metal chandelier/ musical instrument in her studio. The lamp, in turn, inspired a performance piece. Having interesting colors and shapes surround you as you work and think, can help to give you ideas faster than you can use them.

COVER THE WALLS: To this end I advise all costume shops to plaster every inch of their wall space with pictures, objects, fabrics and paint of an inspiring nature. Do not limit yourself to bulletin boards. If you have cement walls (who doesn't?) hot glue the stuff to the cement. Odd to say I learned this trick not from a costumer, but from visiting the study of writer Anne Rice, author of Interview With the Vampire. She coats the entire wall opposite her word processor with pictures she feels are appropriate to her next novel. (No I don't know her, I just knew a former house sitter).   Doing this in a shop is tremendously inspiring. When one is tired and running out of ideas, looking at blank walls is depressing and counter productive. When ideas are falling off all the walls around you, on the other hand, it is nearly impossible to give up. In addition, feel free to decorate the furniture, the lamps, the floor and ceiling to the extent that fire code permits. For more about this see the Painting the Furniture section.

MORGUE: A morgue is simply a clipping file of articles and pictures on subjects you may later have use for. Newspaper publishers keep them on noteworthy figures, and makeup designers keep them on different facial features. You, quite obviously, need to keep them on costumes and matters relating to costume. I typically keep articles on how-to do costume things from magazines like Sunset, that tell you "How to Marbleize Fabrics" and the like. I also keep pamphlets and articles on the history of costume in these files as well.

XEROXES: Many times, you can't cut out the picture of a good idea since it's in a book. If you can't afford to buy the book you can afford to Xerox the important parts for reference. In some places color Xerox is even cheap enough to use. While in places that don't have Xerox machines, (like Russian libraries) use your notebook to copy everything. This will give you drawing practice, as well as allow you to save ideas that you see for later. 

BUILD YOUR OWN LIBRARY: On the other hand, if you can afford the book, buy it. Costume books are inspiring, enlightening, and fun. Besides which, their resale value usually keeps apace of inflation, so if you ever quit costuming, you can often resell them at a profit. Owning your own library is a tremendous asset in time saved hunting at public libraries at the last minute. However, public libraries and University libraries are great, too. More about library hunting can be found in the section on Library Research. Part of my hoard of costume books at UAF

RICH EYES: "I fear you have sold your own lands to see other men's; then, to have seen much and to have nothing, is to have rich eyes and poor hands...and to travel for it too!" ---W. Shakespeare, As You Like It, IV. 1.

"We travel not to see new places, but to see with new eyes." --Marcel Proust

This exercise is a simple thing to do in a new, unfamiliar place, but a difficult one to do in one's own backyard. As the above quotations indicate, this is one reason we travel. However, it is possible to do this on one's home turf, either by sitting at a new perspective (remember in The Dead Poet's Society, when the teacher had students stand on his desk?), like the floor, or on top of a piece of furniture, or simply by concentrating on looking at the world, hard.

You need to make an effort to stop. Just stop. And look at the world around you. Whether it is to look in a garbage can, or at a sunset, or at the room you are sitting in, and mine it for visual information about color, texture, shape, and that indefinable thing beauty. This is not only a help to you as an artist, but as a person. If you can do this one thing, you will forever be able to see some beauty in any place you are stuck, and therefore forever be able to see your cup as half full rather than half empty. It is the single most artistically and emotionally valuable talent you can develop.

I personally think I "discovered" how to do it while traveling to England when I was 21. Some people are born knowing it. For me it took a hellish day thousands of miles from home, to "get" it. I was in the 4th week of a five week trip in dreadful weather, all alone. I went to York on a one day trip from London, and missed my train back, just as it was turning dark and I was getting a migraine. I had almost two hours to wait for the next train, I had heavy books in a package, a thin coat, and nowhere to sit. I was horribly homesick and cold. Then lightning burst the clouds over head into rain. I should have cried. But this was England, you don't do that sort of thing in public.

So instead I looked up at the dirty glass of the Victorian train station roof, the faded Northern evening light, the sheets of rain, and concentrated on how beautifully the silver gray of the rain harmonized with the lead gray of the sky and the pale gray of the dirty glass. I concentrated on how the wavelets of rain running down the glass, matched the fish scale shape of the panes in their cast iron frames. And I sniffed the air until I could smell the scent of wood burning in nearby fireplaces, and strained my ears to hear the church bells doing the complicated mathematical dances the English call change-ringing. And suddenly I was in the most beautiful, interesting place I'd visited all day, and the time passed quickly, and pleasurably. And I can still, fifteen years later, tell you how it looked and felt.

You need to open your eyes to all the beauty that surrounds you on a daily basis, and feed on it like a hungry beast. You need to pursue it like a hunter and devour it with your eyes to memorize every detail. These details can be used later, like your notes and Xeroxes, to jog your creativity when needed. They can also feed your soul as you take them in, every day. They are the basic food of artistic inspiration, and you cannot create anything original without them.

Did you dream last night about wandering down a black hall of graffiti to a hidden palace of costume?