ADVANCED DRAWING: Alter Ego Project

Alter Ego Project

-Alyssa Tucker-

For this project, I had a lot of trouble actually picking what I was going to do for it since I had a lot of different ideas about what I could interpret as my alter ego since I have so many. I am a cosplayer, meaning that I make a lot of costume recreations for characters I like, and most of the time I really go all out with my designs bringing in wigs, colored contacts, special effects makeup, and things like that to completely become that character. I've even taught myself some of the activities these characters like to do in their source materials. Like for example, I cosplay a magician that can also do real fire magic so I taught myself how to do close up magic that I added fire effects to with flash paper. So in my case, each and every one of these costumes is a different alter ego for me. So I wanted to bring that aspect of my life into this project since its such a big part of my life. I wanted to find a way to combine all of my different costumes into one piece to try and bring all of my alter egos together into one hodgepodge of an alter ego.

With this concept in mind, I started brainstorming how I could bring this into one cohesive image. I didn't want to just draw the image of this imaginary alter ego I wanted to find a way to bring actual pieces of the costumes into the piece. One thing that is always left over after creating a costume is the fabric scraps that I never have any idea what to do with them. However, in a way they are bits of all of these costumes that I keep in a box in my closet next to the actual costumes. So I had the idea to take these fabric scraps and make a collaged image of all of the fabrics to create my image of my alter ego. I have seen a lot of these things throughout my time in fabric stores called portrait quilts, they are quilts that are made in a way to show an image what they are created rather than just a pattern like most quilts do. They are pretty difficult to make and it's also quite hard to find information on how to make them as well. So I took inspiration from this quilting technique to create my alter ego image.

So to create the image I gathered a bunch of different pieces from a bunch of different costumes that I have done throughout my life and put them all on at once. Three dresses, a breastplate, necklace, three wigs, gloves, props, four bows, etc. I then took that picture I took and put it into photoshop to simplify the colors and break it down into shapes using the cutout filter. From there I printed out the file to scale and cut out each individual color, which I then taped to Heat-n-Bond paper which I then ironed on to the correct colors. After cutting out each piece with the iron on applique adhesive on the back I began to assemble the image, it was basically a giant puzzle but once it was all together I ironed it onto the background fabric. I emphasized some of the pieces, and drew in the eyes, with Copic Marker, and did some details with gold and silver paint markers. To finish it off I put some gold piping that I had from another costume around the border, put a couple rivets on the gloves and a bit of lace.

I used this youtube tutorial to help me with technique, it's really old and not the best quality video but it was the only comprehensive guide I could find.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbjBtEmjfpfunH1yXB9Nr0WaaIfYbrzxo

Also this website:
https://weallsew.com/create-a-fabric-collage-art-quilt-from-a-photo/

Examples of Portrait Quilts