Customer Reviews

Costume Craftwork on a Budget: Clothing, 3-D Makeup, Wigs, Millinery & Accessories

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This is a particularly good supplementary reference for those who have Sylvia Moss' brilliant textbook, Costumes and Chemistry: A Comprehensive Guide to Materials and Applications, which is invaluable for the safety information and product analyses alone, but also features tons of great information at the end following step-by-step processes for creation of high-end Vegas showgirl costumes, Broadway effects, etc. Moss' projects are generally big-budget ones (quite useful to read about but beyond the range of most regional and university theatres' budgets), whereas Tan Huaixiang's book illustrates ways of creating elaborate effects, but offers creative ways of using cheap, easily obtained materials to achieve complicated "fantastical" costume looks.

For my own use, i'm on the fence about using it as a text for my crafts artisanship classes because it seems to be aimed toward designers who primarily work jobs where there's no crafts artisan and do their own crafts, and our program is fairly specific in its focus--top level Costume Production. There's no design track for graduate students at all, so the designer-centricity of the text isn't relevant. There's also a HUGE middle section on millinery and headdress-making that's not really my speed--i'm satisfied teaching my millinery course from Denise Dreher's From the Neck Up: An Illustrated Guide to Hatmaking and Tim Dial's Basic Millinery for the Stage. I do think it's pretty exciting for its masks and prosthetics section; there's not really a good up-to-date text on mask making specifically for theatre (Thurston James' The Prop Builder's Mask-Making Handbook is from the early 1990s, out of print now, and lacking in the safety precautions area.). I intend to keep it in my shop library--many of the projects are very inspiring--and if you are a designer who typically does a lot of your own craftwork, you probably want to check it out!

This book jumps right in with instructions to make a full head casting with an alginate negative and finishing with your ultracal 30 positive. She uses this positive to make masks and prosthesis, from foam, and latex. She refers to this as 3-D make-up. Her mask section uses the same head casting to start, but explores different materials from flexible foam sheets (varaform) to decopage.
She covers wigs with the same step by step detailed procedures. She uses plenty of photo's, and drawings so her instructions are very clear and easy to follow. A beginner will be able to make a wig, whether full or half bald with no problems.
Her other topic with wonderful detail is millinery. Her hats are beautiful and made from everything! She also covers headresses, with a wonderful section on creating animal heads starting with the wire formature and tieing the foam sheets to achieve different shapes, such as eyelids, ears, mouth parts.

As far as the clothing aspect is concerned, she only touches on it briefly. Her ideas are good but I would recommend other sources.

I believe the title and cover of the book are misleading. I actually bought it for ideas to alter existing costume stock into period pieces. However, I don't think there's another book out there which covers masks, wigs, and headresses with nearly the detail and precision that this one does. This book is a 'stand alone' for costuming from the neck up.

greaat shipping time. As others had said though, its great for costumework that has to do with the face, such as prosthetics, wigs, headdresses, and such. . .but only says so little about clothing. Even though I would still highly recomend it to anyone whose interested, has good pictures and is very descriptive. I also like how it actually shows people useing and wearing the items.