Costume Design Portfolio — Graduate Studies in Theatrical Design

This collection represents my work as a costume designer, exploring narrative, character, and visual storytelling through the elements of design. These renderings were created during my graduate studies while pursuing an MFA in Direction at the University of Idaho, as part of both Costume Design II and Advanced Costume Design courses. Entering those classes as an absolute beginner, I discovered a deep and unexpected passion for the craft. The projects presented here reflect that evolution — a study in how line, color, texture, and silhouette bring story to life.

My process is collage-based and primarily digital, combining multiple techniques to construct each rendering. Some are fully digitally drawn, while others integrate hand-drawn components with manipulated imagery, filtered photographs, and layered textures. Each design becomes a hybrid composition — part illustration, part digital collage — allowing me to explore proportion, fabric realism, and emotional tone while maintaining flexibility in iteration and refinement.

The first project, an avant-garde haute couture interpretation of The Seven Deadly Sins, was an exercise in exaggeration and abstraction. Our instructor challenged us to push line and shape beyond the natural human form, exploring excess and emotion as visual concepts. The resulting designs are sculptural and symbolic, functioning as larger-than-life expressions of each sin rendered through dynamic shape, color, and form.

The second project in this series features designs for an unrealized Christmas production for the University of Idaho. This work merged traditional holiday iconography with contemporary theatrical stylization, focusing on cohesion of palette, texture, and silhouette. The project emphasized atmosphere and tone — building a world that balanced familiarity with invention, warmth with wit.

The third and culminating project presents designs for Lisa Loomer’s The Waiting Room, a play that intertwines three women from distinct historical eras: an 18th-century Chinese woman bound by beauty rituals, a Victorian woman restricted by corsetry, and a modern American woman navigating cosmetic surgery. The challenge was to create a unified visual language that respected each period’s authenticity while emphasizing their shared themes of constraint and identity. Each rendering includes head-to-toe looks that express character through silhouette, gesture, and palette, integrating texture and composition to reflect each woman’s cultural and emotional landscape.

Together, these projects trace the evolution of my understanding of costume design — from conceptual experimentation to fully realized narrative design. They mark a turning point in my artistic development, revealing how design can serve as both character study and visual collage, and how the language of clothing continues to shape the way I approach storytelling on stage.