Ultimate Bridal Fashion Fix: Costume Designer's Special Hand Painting

For the past month I have been designing As You  Like It, the first leg of the Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory Season. The final scene demands a big reveal when Rosalind returns in a 'Forest ' wedding dress to marry Orlando. The design of the dress has gone through some changes, but we finally settled on a classic vintage wedding dress. A few days in the director felt it was too 'white', so I set about hand painting vines and leave all over the dress. I had seen some beautiful gowns from the 1930s era with similar embellishment; used to contour the body and then stopping just short of the knee

Have a look at my pinterest board for the show for the full list of inspirations.

The dress came from Heartfelt Vintage, on Alma Vale Road, and already had a lovely floral motif woven into the fabric.

I started to slowly build the design around the areas I was confident that I wanted leaves. As it progressed I decided I was happy with how it was...and kept going!

This is not the first time I have hand painted a garment, back in my days as a Cloth Magazine designer, I tried this out on a dress creating a style reminiscent of floral designs on porcelain jugs, inspired by Mary Katrantzou.

the Cloth gang

Photo Amanda Thomas

If you want to try this technique yourself, all you need is an assortment of fabric paints, some turpentine to thin the oil based paints and white spirit to clean the brushes.

Styling: Molly Mishi May Bridal Photoshoot

Photo Amanda Thomas

At the end of last year I styled and Art Directed my first Bridal shoot for designer Molly Mishi May, shot by Amanda Thomas.

The results were published in Elegant Magazine (above), and below is a sneak peak!

Photo Amanda Thomas

Photo Amanda Thomas

Photo Amanda Thomas

Molly is a fresh contemporary bridal designer, creating interesting styles and shapes around the needs and wishes of each bride. It was a challenge to find a new way of styling and shooting Bridal. Amanda, Molly and I recce'd a number of venues and chucked together various ideas until settling on a crisp cool setting of brick wall, allowing the dresses to 'do the talking'. The wall was in fact wallpaper with a brick effect, taped to a wall. Somehow, in Amanda's shots, the joins of the paper became invisible and no post production was needed for the background.