Character Experiments

As a rule, I always work very BIG, not always through choice, but I've forever found it incredibly difficult to work in a small or meticulous way. However, I saw some beautiful initial costume drawings at Pamela Howard's exhibition that really appealed to me. They were small paintings of all the initial ideas for costumes- no larger than a thumb. Working on this scale meant that the paintings included little but the silhouette and the colours- not forcing the designer to work in huge amounts of detail as working on a larger scale might.
At the moment I'm at the point with my costume designs where I know roughly what I want each character to be wearing, but I'm not ready to start thinking about any details properly yet, so adopting this method worked well for me.
So far I have done a selection of choices for Dogberry, Verges, The Watch, Leonato, Benedick, and Claudio. I have not yet done the women or the princes because I feel I need to continue to conduct a bit more in depth research before I play around with any initial designs for them.

I have also been researching a lot about the wider implications of doing a production like this- specifically the offence caused by Cultural Appropriation. I've read a lot of essays etc on this subject and nothing has sent alarm-bells ringing too much for me. There's a book in the library called 'Cultural Appropriation and the Arts' which I hope will guide me through some potentially sticky issues. But personally, I think that as long as I conduct my designing with sensitivity then there shouldn't be any problem at all.