Dreamcoat Part Two: Hand-painted Motifs
There's a second part to the surface design adventures of Jen Caprio's costume design for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat: hand-painted appliques! (The first part of the process, the digital textile design of the collection of twelve background fabrics, was described in this prior post here.)
Recall if you will Jen's design for the coat, inspired by the stained-glass artwork of Marc Chagall:
Costume design for coat, front view, by Jennifer Caprio
It's pretty clear from the Spoonflower collection of Dreamcoat fabrics that i digitally created for Jen, how the basic background design of the coat is made--each gore of the frock coat's skirt is cut from a different fabric, and the panels of the upper body/sleeves correspond similarly. But, what about all the specific separate motifs, the animals and plants and symbols and iconography?
Those wound up being hand-painted appliques, which would be positioned on the coat in the final fitting, and stitched in place by the construction team. I'm exceptionally fortunate that the task of painting those appliques was granted to me. Jen supplied me with JPGs of each applique she wanted (68 in all!) and its dimensions, and a bunch of cotton-back satin. My plan was to mottle-dye the cotton-back satin with fiber-reactive dyes, and to paint the design lines with an heat-set textile paint.
I sorted the images into ones i considered one- or two-color categories--blue-greens, blue-purples, red-orange, etc. There were a few that had so many colors i knew i would have to paint them separately, but most of them fit this process, which sped up the production of them. I could dye a chunk of the satin, then paint the details. Sure, this introduced a bit of randomness into the process, since you can't control how a mottle-dye process comes out, specifically, but we felt that made the resulting images look even more like colored glass.
For example, let's look at the blue-green horse on the front left skirt panel of the coat in the design:
Here's that horse as a hand-painted applique. Doesn't it look like colored glass?
Lion visible on the right middle of the coat design. For this one, i painted back into him with dye concentrates, over top of the mottled yellow base. (You can also see one of the hands holding the horn across the chest here, and two stars that appear on the back of the coat.)
Also, since i had 68 motifs to create and basically a weekend in which to make it happen, I enlisted the help of my former student, crafts assistant Lydia Hanchett. We painted these over the course of a couple days in my home studio, hanging them to dry on the shower rods in my bathrooms. We then heat-set the inks using an industrial heat press.
For a handful of the appliques, there was no clear "background color," so i painted the black lines first on them.
Then i "watercolored" them with fiber-reactive dye concentrates, like the flower seen above.
After they all had been heat-set, they got packed off via FedEx to the custom costume house, John Kristiansen NY Inc., where the digitally-printed fabrics had been made into the coat, now anxiously awaiting its menagerie of appliques!
So, the show's in tech now and embarks on its tour March 4th, the first of a twelve-day run in Cleveland, OH. Of course, the plan i gather is for a two-year tour, traveling all across the country, so even though the dates currently announced are only through July, many more engagements are TBA, i'm sure.
I'm personally pretty excited for its 5-day run right here in Durham, NC. Considering that the fabric was printed at the Durham-based Spoonflower, and the motifs painted in my Durham studio, that coat's got a lot of connection to the city!