The drawing style of each set of renderings is also varied as much as possible from show to show to help convey an overall concept of the production’s style, often being done in close imitation of a drawing style of an artist or genre which the director has indicated is the closest (in his or her mind) match to the show.  Students of art history should be able to identify renderings here that are made in close imitation of illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley, George Gros, Jacques Callot, Egyptian wall murals, William Steig, Tarot Cards, children’s book illustrations, and RPG fantasy art. This imitation is deliberate, and often completely indispensable when trying to make certain that the finished costumes most closely imitate the style needed for the director’s concept.  While making the costumes in the studio, the garments are constantly compared to the rendering, and sometimes to the source materials, to make sure the finished product contains the same spirit as the original vision.

 This does not imply that all costumes come out looking exactly like their renderings.  For one thing, renderings are often made that are rejected in meetings, as in the case of the whole first set of sketches for The Bacchae (1997). The drawing for Mamka the Witch in A Russian Christmas Tale (1990) was the seventh one made for this difficult transformation costume.  Costumes also routinely change when the actors playing the role change.  A character interpretation that will work with one actor is rarely suitable for another.  This is why the two different casts for Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1997) have completely different costumes, despite sharing a color scheme to fit with the unchanging set.

Costumes also change when practical considerations like fabric availability, actor blocking, or studio staff abilities either force compromises or invite improvements.  Costume renderings are a mere step in a process of group-made art that must flow and flex with the many aesthetic and practical needs of a production, and the group of artists who come together to create it.

 “I am a costumer; I make clothes for imaginary people”.  For all that I work in collaboration as an artist, I think I am very solitary by nature, and spend many hours each day in invented worlds of my imagination.  My chosen art allows me to take these fictitious people that run around in my head, and make them physically manifest themselves much as I imagine them.  It is a curiously magical feeling at times, as though I had some sort of impossible superpower that could anatomically transform ordinary undergraduate students into radically different extraordinary beings for a few hours. 

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