Fantasy video games, movies, books, etc. are too often about a male hero either going on the journey, slaying the dragon, saving the girl, or all of the above. Thus with this project I hoped to celebrate the often overlooked or nonexistent heroine by creating original characters and costumes to represent them. I received a grant from the Stanford Arts department to complete this project and had the chance to put it on display on campus during Fall Quarter ‘18. The project took an entire summer to complete and allowed me to completely immerse myself in costume design and the process of taking 2d designs to 3d.

Tools & Materials:

Design: Autodesk Fusion 360, Adobe Photoshop, pencil & paper

Fabrication: fabric, sewing machine, thermoplastic, EVA foam, Dremel hand tool, acrylic paints

Takeaways:

• Fleshing out a design from scratch is a lengthy process

• Everything takes at least 3x as long as you would expect

• Taking extra steps in the design phase pay off later (ex. modeling everything in CAD)

Design Phase:

The first steps were in the design phase which took place before the start of summer. I started gathering inspiration from Pinterest and sketching some possible design elements for the costumes. Once the ideas started to feel a bit more coherent I began sketching out potential designs.

After sketching out iterations of the designs that I was pretty happy with, I began designing the props. I sketched them out on paper and then moved into Fusion 360 to get a better sense of space and visual weight and proportioning of the props.

Creation:

To create the faux armor, I formed and sculpted thermoplastics and EVA foam to the geometries I wanted using heat, sculpting tools, Dremel tool, and my hands. This was a very time intensive process and definitely took trial and error. After creating the forms, they were primed, painted, and weathered to create a realistic armor look. After all of the armor was created I sewed all the garments to be worn under the armor.