by Graduating Art Major, Lillian Norris completed her honors capstone project here at Herkimer Community College. Centering her project around the idea of building costumes, she split it into two parts. Her ideas stemmed around the idea of building costumes for costume design and production in movies.
The first part of her project was creating the costume. The goal was to use as many materials on hand and spend as little to no money as possible. Using the process of costume production, she sketched out her ideas, planned the steps she needed to proceed and then eventually turned her visualizations into reality.
The second part of her project was based on involving the community. Norris set up a demonstration of building costumes at the community’s local high school, Herkimer High School. During her visit, she displayed her previous costume designs and helped kids design and make their own creations.
When brainstorming and structuring such a large scale project, Norris explained how her previous interest on designing costumes helped her understand and better research the topic of costume production.
“Usually it starts with ideas, and then sketches, and then more sketches, and then you start to piece together how to throw this thing together,” said Norris. The second part was planned out by talking to people and getting suggestions on how to involve the community.
Norris states the most challenging aspect of this project was keeping up and committing to it. Being in the honors class helped her realize there was no turning back, helping her fully commit and complete a capstone project that would not only further her costume production skills but also the skills of artists around her.
The impact of her project not only benefitted her, advancing her understanding about the process of costume design and production but benefitted future artists around her. By beating the stifle of school environments and lack of money, Norris hopes to have helped show that designing and producing costumes or any form of art can happen regardless of lack of resources.