The Silmarillion
Project
One of my ongoing projects is a continuation of something I started while at university studying Costume Design. There I started a project based on a fictional text, so, inevitably I went with one of Tolkien's texts. I ruled out The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit because I knew that I'd be far too influenced by existing interpretations to come up with something original, so I chose The Silmarillion.
My initial research ended up about 35 times the length that we were asked for, because, when you're asked to research the text and a few main characters to draw up initial ideas for, and you're studying The Silmarillion, you'll end up trying to nail it down from the hundreds to a key few, which in itself is a huge task.
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I landed on a few key characters, based on a few factors: how relevant they are to the story as a whole, the amount of time they appear in the story, and how much physical description/ key identifiers they have. My narrowed down set included characters like Beleg Cuthalion, Ecthelion of the Fountain, Thingol, Turin Turambar, Earendil and Eol the Dark Elf.
As I ended up leaving university before I finished this project, I was left with a lot of research and a pile of designs that were just sitting around. This seemed like a waste of a fair amount of time and effort, so I decided to pick them back up and work back into them. At present, I've developed costume progressions for most of my characters throughout the story, drawn out and developed designs for about a third of them, as well as multiple other characters like Galadriel, Maglor, Maedhros, Cirdan, Beren and Finrod Felagund. Most recently, I've gotten to the stage of drafting patterns for certain pieces, with fabrics chosen and laid out for multiple different characters, most recently developing related colour palettes and fabrics for the Doriath pantheon of characters, namely Beleg Cuthalion, Mablung of the Heavy Hand, Thingol, Turin, Melian, Saeros, Celeborn and Beren's Wolf Hunt attire.
Under here I'll post brief roundups of the progress on this project so far whenever anything new happens, but hopefully there will be some blog posts or a podcast episode coming at some point to keep people up to date!