You Need A Starting Point

When I'm costuming, I have to start somewhere.  Yes, I have patterns.  But since most of my costuming is custom work based on a specific character I rarely have a pattern specific to the need.  I'm not yet at the point of completely creating my own patterns with a computer program, but I've gotten darn good at taking existing patterns and modifying or mixing them. 

Costuming is a creative process and you have to know where you're going in order to make a map to get there.  For me it helps to have sketches, whether I make them or have them made.  Here's a picture of my current "idea wall" with several of my works-in-progress.

And here's a close-up of the sketch my husband made with notes about my steampunk Cheetara costume. 

My husband is quick to state that he's not an artist and that this is not to scale (those are not my proportions).  But the sketch gives me an idea of where to start.  With a picture at hand I can go through my patterns and find something that will meet those needs.  Though the costume is still being created, you can see how it's starting to look like the picture.

Here's a sketch provided by one of my customers, based on an episode of Star Trek: Voyager. 

And here's that costume in progress. 

There's still a good bit of work to do, including modifying it to have that "dip" in the cleavage.  But again you can see how a basic sketch give a costumer an idea of how to get started.

The difficult part is actually creating something from a sketch.  And that's where the skill of the costumer comes into play!