Frankenstein Designs

"I followed nature to her lair, and stripped her of all her secrets!"

I for one was never into Frankenstein before this project. Whether it was the gory nature or the twisting way Mary Shelly wrote the book, it just wasn't for me. So it's safe to say I went into this with a bit of apprehension unto whether I would be any good at designing such a horror filled story. But Nick Dears play interpretation put it into words I could understand and relate with, I found myself drawn in and feeling for these characters I once despised the idea of and I started to have a feeling I would enjoy this project in the end.

To begin we created a large graph of all the characters and the scenes and marked off each character accordingly with notes about their costumes described in the text. Once this part was done, as well as the research into 1815-1823 (our given time) the designing could finally happen! Our tutor presses our minds to the farthest corners to create dynamic and interesting designs that have feeling and soul, not just the fashion illustrations all of us love to do. This involves creating a back ground of the design first with just 3 colours and black and white to shade. For this I chose to use the 3 primary colours, blue, red and yellow as the play is all about the fundamental elements of what it is to be human. These colours are the most basic of colours and together create a vast colour wheel to completion thus the fundamental elements of colour. Furthermore the blue and the red lend themselves very well to creating a dark, dank and eerie atmosphere. I wanted the backgrounds to have an electric quality about them as The Creature was born into humanity through electricity, to achieve this I drew lines and splodges of ink over water washed paper. I then blotted this with tissue. The final outcome was a messy dark atmosphere that framed the designs.

Victor in his operating apron and The Creature being "born"

Elizabeth in her night gown

Elizabeth in her Mourning dress and Wedding dress

Victor in his travelling cloak

This is just a small selection off the designs, in total there was 26! And that was just for the main characters. This project really put into perspective how much work is put into creating an entire production, the amount of thought to go into designing just the back ground characters is vast.

These weren't my most sucessfull designs of all time but I learnt a lot from them and had a good time doing them

#Frankenstein #Design