Designing a Star Wars Costume

How to create multiple looks for costume design in the Halloween industry.

Hello fellow associates, This post is on how to create multiple looks for costume design. Being that I am a Star Wars fan and we are so close to another Star Wars movie (which the new trailer looks amazing by the way)I’m going to do the tutorial using Darth Vader, stormtrooper and boba fett.Yes all bad guys! because they’re my favorite.

Having done work in the Halloween industry I’ve been fortunate to have designed over a thousand costumes for 4 major companies. When working for such places sometimes you are expected to produce a lot of work in a short amount of time. Which is pretty much any job, even when its for fun like steemit.com, as we all know the more you produce in anything you do only makes you better not to mention faster. In order to achieve a quantity goal what’s worked best for me is to draw in photoshop using the layers for everything

Here, I’ve created an action pose model for this blog, which I’ll be using to draw the three characters mentioned above. Once you’ve drawn your model and your happy with it and the model is centered on your page you can begin to draw over your model.

Here I’ve completed all three characters in all their glory. again every single item of their costumes in its own titled layer.

This is where it gets fun and you can start creating multiple looks for one costume really fast. Because everything you drew is on its own layer and the models are a copy of each other in the same size.

You can start dragging layers from one page to the other, by doing this you can create countless combinations that will give your Art director many more choices until a more specific direction is chosen. This will make you look good in the process and you’ll be seen as a trusted source to deliver a high quantity of material.



I couldn't resist renaming them it was too funny to pass up.
This technique is useful when you are requested to design multiple costumes for one subject, i.e. a witch or devil girl or Frankenstein and so on. Usually the project will start in a very general style but will ultimately by providing a wide variety of choices will help to narrow down the style. So if you have to create one costume its good to create 3 different looks and mix them up.
A good Art director will decide fairly quickly which direction he or she wants to take.

There’s a lot of variables when designing costumes and the biggest is cost followed by availability of materials but everything starts with the first concept drawings which are usually the funnest before major changes are applied.
I hope you have enjoyed this tutorial, and of course everything takes time to be good and fast at but if you practice this technique you can achieve a lot really fast. and over time you will have a huge library filled with interchangeable items.
see you on the next post.
Star Wars characters owned by Disney and Lucasfilm LTD.

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