Clowning Around - Second Update

Second Update: Moodboards and Sketches

Some things are coming together! I have developed a bit of my clown drag persona and have been working on the renderings for my costume. I continued over the past two weeks researching how clowns develop their personas and created a moodboard of ideas I was drawn to for my character, both personality and costume wise.

The character: I haven’t landed on a name yet. I have the hardest time coming up with names. But my character is based on this type of moth called Idealus Herois (aka. The Clown Moth). I became really drawn to this creature as the basis for my character because I feel that it speaks a lot to the transformative aspects of being queer. There is a coming into oneself, external and internal, that I have experienced through discovering and accepting my queer identity.

So my character is a moth, and she finds herself in the human world and wants nothing more than to be human. As she explores the human world she learns the customs and rules that we have made up for ourselves and she discovers that she is very out of place in this world. She attempts to fit in, but in her efforts she starts to appreciate her differences and ultimately accepts herself as a moth.

The costume: I wanted the costume to feature silhouettes and nods to the kinds of clothing that I find myself most comfortable in. I love to play with gender, oversized silhouettes, nothing really makes me feel better than a suit, and I am rarely without a hat on my head. You’ll see oversized sleeves and pants, a headcovering or a hat, and a vest. With the oversized sleeves, I wanted to allude to wings without necessarily having to explicitly have wings on the costume. I was drawn to the translucency of the wings and wanted to replicate that feeling in the pants so I’m thinking of constructing it out of a sheer fabric and wearing striped tights underneath. I wanted to stick fairly strictly to the color palette of red, yellow, black, and white featuring small contrasting pops of a teal blue which showed up time and time again in my moodboard. I am considering some fur accents because the moth has a patch of fur on it. In this design I was looking for those pockets of play; The antenna being obnoxiously long, or the sleeves and pants being ridiculously big give me things to play with as an actor when I get into the rehearsal and performance stage.

So the moral of the story is that I have been working away on my designs and am feeling like I am in a pretty good spot! Over the next two weeks I want to have my fabric ordered, patterns chosen, renderings completed, and I want to have started on the slopers I need to create!

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