Category Archives: How-to

Classes, How-to, Workshops and Presentations

Low Cost Prescription Glasses For Your Costumes (Costume College 2024)

These are some notes and links for a workshop I did with Morgan Gasman at #CostumeCollege2024 on “Tips for finding low-cost high style prescription glasses and ways to modify them for aesthetics and comfort.” Photos from the workshop will appear here when I get some. (Did you take pictures during the lecture? If so, send them to tara@costumes-org ) Meanwhile, here are the useful links for workshop goers and others:

ALERT! Someone at the workshop inadvertently left a pair of their own Zenni animal print glasses amidst my show-and tell glasses that were packed up and taken home to San Rafael! To have me send them to you Text (or phone) me at 415-272-5157 and give me your name and address so I can mail your prescription peepers back to you!

Tara Maginnis in a pair of inexpensive Wherelight progressive glasses she blinged out with rhinestones and glitter glue!

Online Purveyors of good wild and mild prescription fashion glasses at prices too cheap to fathom:

Online Glasses at higher prices than these crazy deals, but still good rates. If you sign up for spam, you can often also get BOGO and other offers in your weekly spam from them.

  • Payne Glasses Very good prices. They also sell a lot of prescription sports goggles which might be useful for cosplay. https://www.payneglasses.com
  • Zenni Very high quality, at good prices with lenses made in Ignacio, California – Really great safety glasses also! Check out the collection created by the late Iris Apfel for some extremely fun styles. https://www.zennioptical.com
  • Vooglam is nearly all big wild “statement” glasses in fun colors and patterns. If you are looking for something you want for a Rita Skeeter cosplay or have have seen an over the top style somewhere that is not already at Wherelight, this is your best shot at finding it. https://www.vooglam.com/
  • Aoolia is where i go to drool over glasses that I’m typically too cheap to buy. They sell ones that look like they escaped from a 1980s futuristic space comedy designed by “New Wave” Italians. They sell for what you would pay at your doctor’s office, https://www.aoolia.com/category-high-end-designer-glasses-520 happily quite a few of their styles filter into Wherelight eventually.

Where to get any type lenses put into glasses you own:

Links on Glasses History & Places to Purchase Reenactor type Glasses :

Actual Vintage and Antique Glasses

  • While you can also hunt on Etsy for Pince-nes and other vintage glasses, the best deals can be found on eBay simply by typing in the search “vintage eyeglasses lot”. If you bid low on several group sets you usually will find one or more lots come your way

Stick On Lenses

Vintag-ish readers, Party Glasses and Blinged-out Fashion Sunglasses

Other Glasses I Just Learned about…..

Classes, Distance Education, How-to, Makeup Designs for Theatre & Film, Stage Makeup Class

STAGE MAKEUP CLASS PAGES 56: Watch Injury Makeup Video(s)!

[This page is part of a mirror of my Canvas learning system pages I created for my Drama 112 Intro Stage Makeup class at DVC.  If you want to use this content for another Canvas class shell you can find it in Canvas Commons by searching for “Tara Maginnis” and you can download all or part of this directly into your shell with all the extra cool formatting of colored divider lines, right side embedded Giphy animations, etc. already put in, if you are working with a different system, it is ok to copy and paste from here, and then customize the pages as you need  for your classes].

This is the official class how-to video: 

This video covers a bunch of different techniques.  But, for this assignment you are also required to hunt down additional how-to web pages or videos to supplement this.    You are not required to do a makeup rendering, but you must do some research.   Happily, I can point you towards some links and videos recommended by students in the past:

For example, Spring 2020 during the lockdown we concentrated on accessing F/X recipes that used normal household products like soap, Vaseline, cotton balls, T.P., cheesecloth and Kleenex as well as food products like syrup, food color, egg white, gelatin, flour, oatmeal, etc. because students had no access to the latex or silicone makeup products we keep at DVC.  The results of this were promising, as frankly, every FX makeup before WWII was done with items like these, and those you already have in your kit (spirit gum & wax).  Now you can easily get more exciting stuff like latex, silicone, (and perhaps even the great old-time product rigid collodion), but this costs $$$, and you are starving students, so this stuff is optional. 

These famous movie makeup fx designs were made using spirit gum, wax and those household items mentioned above (and wounds are even easier):

Boris Karloff as the Mummy
Lon Cheney in his Phantom of the Opera Makeup holding his kit
Makeup by Lon Cheney in Phantom of the Opera
Makeup for Max Schrek in Nosferatu
Man in the Moon makeup from Georges Melies "A Voyage to the Moon"

So here are some web pages of text & pictures tutorials we found:

You can also research in books for other makeup methods for creating bruises, cuts, burns, scars, etc. (Or you can search for images of real injuries to replicate) This is your opportunity to learn about more techniques than those covered in the class video.  The internet is filled with TONS of great how to pages and videos on this topic so you can learn more. Back in 1996 when I first went on the internet (and it was pretty primitive) even then, this topic was the single biggest theatre makeup topic to be found on it.  Gather together some of your source material and submit it in the Injury Makeup Research Assignment (on the next page).    You can also find lots of great videos on this at my links list here:

Bruises Cuts and Injury Makeup for Dark, Medium, and Light Skin(Links to an external site.)This one has lots of good options, including unique uses for q-tips and press on nails….

The 5 Minute Crafts YouTube channel actually has even more Halloween makeup tutorials that use household stuff.Links to an external site.

Your kits have a little tub of Scar Wax, but if you need a lot more, here are the household products you can use to make more.  Students in past semesters have often had better results with making their own custom made and colored scar wax using household stuff. 

Classes, Distance Education, How-to, Makeup Designs for Theatre & Film, Stage Makeup Class

STAGE MAKEUP CLASS PAGES 29: Watch Aged Self Videos

[This page is part of a mirror of my Canvas learning system pages I created for my Drama 112 Intro Stage Makeup class at DVC.  If you want to use this content for another Canvas class shell you can find it in Canvas Commons by searching for “Tara Maginnis” and you can download all or part of this directly into your shell with all the extra cool formatting of colored divider lines, right side embedded Giphy animations, etc. already put in, if you are working with a different system, it is ok to copy and paste from here, and then customize the pages as you need  for your classes].      

This week the assigned video is again me doing a self-aged makeup.  Obviously, the details will not directly apply to you, but I HIGHLY RECOMMEND you watch this video anyway.  In it, I not only talk about details of aging, but also face changes that come with the process of dying, as well as show you ways to stretch your face in order to find your own locations of future wrinkles, using this method will help you whether your usual gender is male, female or non-binary, or your usual color is pink, tan, brown or green! (Lizard people need not remain in hiding here… DVC wants to promote inclusivity with all inhabitants of California!)

Your main goal in this lesson is to find what parts of your face stretch and form into folds as your face moves, because if you know those spots you can design makeup to fall into line with those moving parts and have your makeup amplify your facial expressions on stage. So, while this likely will be your least interesting looking of the three aged makeups you do, it is the most important lesson of the entire semester as it can teach you the most about your face, and faces in general. 

Given that many of you will not be old white women, I also include some additional videos from the interwebs that you can optionally use in addition to the official class video. So, here are mine:

And here are those other handy videos for your perusal, please note, not all of these are in English…

If you find any other great old age makeup links, please forward them to me (Tara) and they will get added to these links lists! Videos are added (as you can see) on the basis of visual content, irrespective of the language used.  I am trying to find MORE good videos in other languages to help ESL students have an easier time. 

Now, watch what you feel you need, and then move on by hitting “next” below.

Classes, Distance Education, How-to, Makeup Designs for Theatre & Film, Stage Makeup Class, STAGE MAKEUP CLASS PAGES

STAGE MAKEUP CLASS PAGES 18: Watch “Corrective”/Straight Makeup Video(s)!

[This page is part of a mirror of my Canvas learning system pages I created for my Drama 112 Intro Stage Makeup class at DVC.  If you want to use this content for another Canvas class shell you can find it in Canvas Commons by searching for “Tara Maginnis” and you can download all or part of this directly into your shell with all the extra cool formatting of colored divider lines, right side embedded Giphy animations, etc. already put in, if you are working with a different system, it is ok to copy and paste from here, and then customize the pages as you need  for your classes].

This is the official class how-to video, naturally, it is an awesome how-to for a “corrective” style makeup for a white woman in her late 40s, with a rectangular face, short nose, and scary eyebrows (me when I recorded it).  However, if you are not these things, you may well wish to watch other videos, either in addition to, or in place of this official one:

Happily, I have found a number of other videos of different sorts of basic theatrical makeup for different types of performance and different types of faces!  Scroll down to see if you find any you think you’d like to watch!

Not enough videos?  These and more are at my Corrective/Straight Theatrical Makeup Playlist.

How-to

Job Advice Questions People Have Asked Me About Costuming & Some Answers:

  • What advice would you give to someone who would like to work in your position or within your organization? If you want or need to make a good income from your job, this may not be a good choice. If you want a lot of free time for a family, this is also not a good choice. You might do better to get a job that pays well and has time off that you can spend being a “hobby” costumer. There are brilliant costumers who do cutting edge work who do not do it for a living. Much of the innovation in our field is done by people who are not relying on costuming as their primary income and having different perspectives gives them great outside of the traditional working costumer’s “box” of thinking on how to make things. If you do still want a job like mine, you want to take your academic work just as seriously as your design work. Most theatrical costume design jobs (that pay enough to live on) are ones associated with academic institutions. So, the more academic degrees you have, the more articles you publish, the more conferences you present to, and the best student opinion forms you get are your ticket to reliable employment. It is possible to get promotion to full professor with design work, but it is much slower than doing it with academic work and publications which non-theatre professors understand. PUBLISH STUFF! Other academics understand it, and it enhances your reputation and job prospects. In all theatre jobs, get along, don’t gossip, get work done, always be civil, calm, and non-dramatic. That stuff belongs on stage, not backstage. Each of us needs to strive to be a calm working cog in a big artistic machine. Take pictures of everything, organize them, and maintain a good-looking portfolio online and in print.
  • Can you describe your career path? As an undergrad, I took classes to become a costume worker or a history teacher. I love history, but really did not want to teach it. After graduation I applied for all sorts of stuff but the jobs that picked me were pretty much all costume ones. I did a lot of “overhire” (hired as an extra costume maker when someplace was in a crunch and needed extra help) and worked as a costume crafts worker, then pattern cutter, then costume shop manager for a small college. This was very difficult because while I had good skills, I have social handicaps that make it absurdly hard to network, which is essential to this sort of grabbing work through word of mouth. I’m somewhere on the autism spectrum and really do not know even now how to do this, which is an enormous challenge that requires massive workarounds. I eventually realized I had to go back and get an MA or MFA to do this at a bigger college for a living wage. In grad school I got more fully into the design and academic parts of the thing, and quickly realized what I wanted was a university costume designer job. I watched during my time at CSU Fresno two different costumers come in and go through the hiring process and saw by the end of my MA that any job like this in California had hundreds of applicants, so an MA (which was standard in many places) was insufficient, only MFAs were even considered, but PhDs made the top of the pile even if their portfolio was not as strong. I was about to graduate with an MA, so I realized my choices were to start over for an MFA, or jump into a PhD program. So I did the latter as academic work was always my strong suit. I worked on a PhD for lots of years, partly at UGA and partly finishing the Dissertation while working at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. I worked at UAF for 18 years, applied for and was promoted to full professor and bought a modest 3 bedroom house in Fairbanks. Apart from print publication, I was also an early website maker and in 1996-97 started up The Costumers Manifesto site which was the largest and most visited costume site until I had to abandon it as a project in 2004-5 to fight cancer. This also helped me with promotion, networking, and general fame. (One of my social workarounds). In 2007 my late Mom was dying, and my dad needed looking after, so I threw it all away and moved in with my parents. In 2008 I got a ½ time costume designer staff job at Diablo Valley College that I could drive to from where I was living with my parents as a caregiver. A year after my mom died, I was able to add being a PT instructor at DVC. In 2019 my dad died, and I inherited a SF Bay Area house I could never have bought on my salary at either UAF or DVC.
  • How has the pandemic impacted your work and career? Well, it did different stuff at different stages, but generally it added work to my two jobs. Our introduction to lockdown at DVC happened just minutes before we were about to start our first tech rehearsal of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. We heard the campus would be closed to students the next day as everything was going to start and decided to let actors wear their costumes a day early, (1st Dress is the Monday after tech in our theatre) and film the rehearsal for them to watch and share with family. We madly photographed everything and the makeup, hair and costume crew which were called but not planning on that were pulled into setting up for a day early dress and then being audience. The following day the whole 7 counties of the SF Bay area went on lockdown where only grocery, hardware and big box stores were open for necessities, and it stayed that way for months (saving countless lives). Firstly, like every instructor I suddenly went from teaching face to face classes to teaching online ones (which continued till Fall 2022). The good news was I was better equipped to do this than most as I had experimented with teaching asynchronous costume classes wholly or partly online while at UAF in the early Aughts, I also had co-authored a set of DVDs on stage makeup (also at UAF) with me as talking makeup head. I had been creating and collecting tons of images for use online since 1996, so I had a lot to work with. As a result, I was able to create online Canvas classes that did not need everyone meeting for zoom lectures, and which were exciting eye-candy. My staff job was in limbo to begin with, because, of course, do you need a costume designer when you are not allowed to do live shows? We staff in our division were all encouraged by our dean to figure out jobs that needed doing in our various departments that we could do either online, or alone in our respective buildings. I started organizing and digitizing an online archive of past DVC Drama shows through Google Sites and Google Photos. The Department of Workforce Development who oversees internships and work study had worked with me as an instructor of record for our Drama students doing internships, saw some of what I was doing, and promptly hired me over the Summer of 2020 to help them with their own Canvas pages and parts of their website to make them more eye-candy and have more online stuff students could do. Also our usual drama students who sign up for internships suddenly could not get theatre internships to fulfill their requirements for our Technical Theatre Certificate, so I invented internships with a revived version of The Costumer’s Manifesto website where they would research and write up articles for it, or I’d set them out to make their own portfolio sites, because this activity did not violate the lockdown, but still was theatre career related work. I occasionally continued to have these sorts of DVC Drama Archive interns even after I could meet up with them face to face. In Fall 2020 we were allowed to film a movie of a play The Dreamer Project, adapted into a film made on campus, for which I essentially gave the students costume instructions for them to self-design their own wardrobe for the film. (They did great!) as at the beginning they were still advising us not to get close enough to touch… I was then tasked instead with designing and making a group of shadow-puppets to be used in part of the film. Meanwhile we prepped up for doing a film version of the Go-Go’s musical Head over Heels in Spring. I did all sorts of research, making, and testing of different types of masks as we lead up to that. Meanwhile, I was filming my own how-to videos of costume sewing at home in a big costume workshop/video studio I made from my late parent’s big master bedroom. In Spring 2021 the musical was cast and we were allowed to film again, but everyone had to be in masks, it was a huge undertaking with the Music, Film, Drama and Musical Production (sound recording) departments all involved from January until late May in filming, editing, etc. Many if not most of our students found it a life changing event, and we were all so careful at all points with masking and maintaining social bubbles outside of the filming itself that out of the close to 100 people involved, not one caught Covid, even though most students weren’t eligible for shots till late in the process, and even faculty (who got priority after seniors, medical and first responders did) did not have it for a couple of months. Many nights we were working with a cast of 25+ and a crew twice that. We wire filming both indoors on our stage and outdoors all over campus. While the costuming was semi normal (I pull bits and pieces, I try them on actors, I decorate and alter them till we end up with something cool. If we can’t, we make something amazing from scratch.) The set situation kept requiring more work because things had to be seen to look good up close on screen, and things had to be able to break down and move from place to place at all hours of the day and night. So I and the movie production assistants who were assigned to costumes switched to helping with set dressing both for the stage and most especially outdoors where I came up with a way to make giant Disney type flowers out of recycled plastic garbage and spray paint, and we just kept making them until we could take any outdoor space with a bit of scrubby green bushes on campus and quickly have it look like this, or spray old bed sheets and add more flowers to cover any inconveniently placed big metal utility boxes that would otherwise intrude on the vision of bucolic Disneyfied Springtime countryside. After doing this like a 4 month long indoor-outdoor tech week the images went into the hands of the editing team and I was thrown into helping a second costumer who was hired to help me part time on Head over Heels, and then I helped her on doing the first live theatre show allowed in our county, The Book of Will done outdoors with only 30 socially distanced audience members allowed per show (less than the number of cast and crew) and actors allowed to have only clear chin spit guard masks. By Fall 2021 all DVC students, staff and faculty had to be vaccinated or do daily testing. We filled out online forms daily to confirm lack of symptoms or known exposure as well. So, we were at last allowed to have actors unmasked while on stage indoors again for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, though audiences had to be at ½ capacity and masked, as well as provide proof of vaccination before buying tickets. The crew was always masked and continues to be as well as actors during non-dress rehearsals (though no longer required by local law) through Spring 2023. We finally had one person in our department test positive and have to quarantine in Spring 2022 (a SM who got an asymptomatic case from a relative) but because of our strict policies at DVC it did not spread. In Fall 2022 we cancelled a performance because a cast member tested positive, and in following days other cast members also had asymptomatic positive tests and we shut down the final weekend of shows so the spread stopped there.
  • Since starting your career, were there areas in your skills/yourself that you grew in? All of them, all the time. If you are not learning something new or doing something hard to figure out at least once a week you die inside. If it is not difficult in some way even theatre work stops being interesting. Despite my painfully socially awkward way of being, I can not only speak in front of my class, but can now speak before other big crowds. I have worked out lots of good tricks and tips to make my drawing better, I have learned all sorts of technical skills both with a computer and with various hand tools. I have got better and better at photography, and the technology has got better for it to make good images cheaper, better, & faster. I’ve learned to write, which while it seems like a not costume related thing, it is really important if you wish to function in academia, which is where the steady theatre jobs are in the US. While I’m still quite handicapped in many ways with my social limitations, I constantly see others like me at 17-20 who wander in with many of these same challenges and can see immediately how far I’ve been able to learn to cope and compensate for my non neurotypical aspect. I’ve learned to signal to “normal”people that while I may seem a bit like an alien, I’m not about to abduct them or probe them in a waythat is unintentionally threatening. I also have accepted that my status as a neurodiverse role model within my department means I will be needed to help shepherd people who are also odd in other ways to help them get to a place where they can more easily function within a neurotypical world without feeling like being different puts them at fault, or that they can’t learn to cope with living within such a world without succumbing to either self-blame or conversely hostility to the neurotypical. This sort of artistic/educational/technical job actually works well for people who are a bit odd. 5.
  • What were the most difficult obstacles you faced when you started your career ? The social aspects. So much of hiring in the commercial theatre world is word of mouth, friend of friend of friend recommendations, and the ability to speak and hustle and sell yourself, so it puts a person like me who has very few friends (all of whom befriended me not the other way around-I still don’t have any idea how to do that) at a complete disadvantage. I have trouble still connecting names and faces and people and facts about them even ones I’ve worked with or taught for years. I simply can’t chat up someone, or remember a name or phone number, or get the nerve to call even if I write it down. The breakthrough was figuring out that college teaching was the best and longest lasting costume gig anyway. I grew up in a family of K-12 & college teachers and administrators, and I knew those rules from my mother’s knee. I know the rules of what they must hire and promote, and I could force my way through that gauntlet step by step even with one MA adviser who consistently favored the other grad student in my year, a passive aggressive hostile PhD dissertation adviser who didn’t even want me assigned to him, members of tenure and promotion committees who think performance and art work is not the equal of traditional publication and presentation, all by publishing and presenting at conferences in addition to my design work. Presenting my design work with spectacular photos, and jumping through the tedious hoops of committee work, service in the academic senate and service in the teacher’s union, and lots of testimonial letters from every person I ever worked with. This is not the work of a short time, you need to start taking and gathering pictures and writing articles and doing those kinds of things as soon as you start, but academia is used to oddballs who are brilliant at their specialty and if you can make a paper trail that proves you are that, they usually have to hire you even if they might want somebody who is a friend of a friend who is not that. It gets you in the door even if you are odd, and then all you have to do is keep up with the daily insanity of the job while continuing to add to that file of paper
  • What is your favorite thing about your job that motivates you to continue doing what you do? The constant variety of interesting “impossible” challenges. It is rarely boring in costume (except sewing and laundry). Days do not have the same exact task as the day before. At any time, someone can wander in the door with a problem, a disaster, or a question they hope you can solve or answer. It is rarely boring.

Costume History, How-to, Menswear, Sewing

The Banyan Project

Banyan Project-HandoutDownload
  • Free Printable Miniature Books for Dollhouses #11 : 18th Century Banyans, mini books by Tara Maginnis

Free Printable Miniature Books for Dollhouses #11 : 18th Century Banyans, mini books by Tara Maginnis:

Pinterest Page : Boys and Banyans

Making an 18th Century Banyan (YouTube)

Custom Made Banyans sold on Etsy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banyan_(clothing)

Old post on Banyans at The Costumers Manifesto

Banyans at the Met

Crafts, Free Stuff, How-to

Instructions for Free Miniature Books for Dollhouse Use Plus PSD Templates for making your own!

4 Comments

So, I recently was asked some questions about the Free Printable Miniature Books for Dollhouse Use and Miniature Books Pages, but the person who wrote me had an email address that kept bouncing back the answers. So I thought I would post answers here in case others had the same question, or she returned to those pages.

She asked if I had instructions, so here are some:

The process takes about an hour per book for me, but can move faster by working on several at once. I usually work with scissors and a purple disappearing color paste glue stick. Print the books on regular cheap thin matte copy paper on one of the better quality print settings.

Use the card stock template to cut out the three little pieces of card stock to make the covers stiffer. Thin card stock (like in cheap Dollar Tree 3×5 cards) is best. It also helps to cut about a millimeter or less off outer corners of the card stock front and back cover to round them very slightly.

Leaving a 1-2mm gap between the cardstock covers and spine for flexibility, cover them with the outer cover pieces by pasting them in to the cover with those small gaps. Then fold over the outer corners and paste, then do the top, bottom and sides.

Join the long strips of pages into a longer single strip, fold and glue and flatten, and stick the spine into the cover.  Then trim and put the end papers on to hide any mess and help hold it all together. 

Finally paste on the cover image(s) and spine text. Let dry overnight.

Book by Nicolas Larmessan on Costumes Of The Trades

I like to work on several books in a row while watching TV. It helps to check the books as they dry, to separate any pages that inadvertently start sticking together from an over abundance of paste. If any book comes out too pasty, I usually can save it with a damp (not wet) q-tip and a bit of “massage” of opening and closing.

If you find you like the format, and have a version of Photoshop that allows lots of layers and want to create some of your own, I have the multilayered PSD templates I created on and use to just drop in pictures & text. You can find lots of copyright expired content online that interests you, and with practice insert and download it into the appropriate layout template in about an hour, so you can make custom books on any topic: 

Google Drive: Photoshop Template for Miniature Books: Basic Portrait Layout Book

Google Drive: Photoshop Template for Miniature Books: Basic Long Portrait Layout Book

Google Drive: Photoshop Template for Miniature Books: Basic Landscape Layout Book

Google Drive: Free Miniature books 1-61 as a single downloadable PDF

That way if you are making a miniature library or whole doll house you can populate it with books that make sense for an imaginary household Grandpa with old military memoirs, Grandma with knitting books, Dad with books on sailboats and the Sartorial Art Journal, Mother with some books on interior design and travel, young uncle with western dime novels and porn, Shockheaded Peter and Oz books for the kids, cookbooks in the kitchen, etc.

Or if you are like me, just pick a topic you like and make it all in miniature!

Book on the 17th Century Court Ballet costumes of Daniel Rabel
Crafts, How-to

Basic Needle-felting

So, needle felting is a craft that is curiously satisfying in a repetitively stabbing something way. It is like a cross between serial killing in miniature and playing solitaire on your phone. It is soothing, and when you are done you end up with something fuzzy and cute (mostly).

Daiso makes teeny $1.50 kits of wool roving for making teeny toy animals. They don’t come with a lot of instructions (or the stabby needle), just the wool, but once you get introduced to needle felting, you realize why: You pretty much can figure out what to do once you see someone do it.

A bunch of these kits of wool roving being re-sold through Amazon

However, I’m sending a bunch of these little kits with my extra needles to some relatives, and I’m guessing they have not seen needle felting and might need a how-to video or two, and some explanation, so here it is on this page:

Fortunately, they are out there:

Once you get past the basics of making little felted do-dads, you can explore a little further and take wool objects like a beret and needle felt designs to them:

Commercially made blank beret with needle felted swirls and small sewn dots added by me.

This gives you a notion of how to make and add felted bits to a beret:

Or you can end up at Lacis in Berkeley taking a class with Kim Van Antwerp on how to make a bendy flying goldfish bracelet:

I’m absurdly proud of this one with leaping goldfish riding a green pond splash.

Classes, How-to, Portfolio Advice

Information on Costume (& other Theatre Tech) Portfolios/Job Seeking

Putting Personality in Your Portfolio & Resume the respectable sounding title TD&T put on my how-to on the topic: Stroking Your Own Ego to Get Jobs is my broad general advice on this topic. Both versions of this cheery screed have their strong points, as well as different bits of my old portfolios. However, there are a lot of specifics I can send your way as well:

My own current web portfolio of course is this website, taramaginnis.com

It costs me a low amount of money to operate annually, but hundreds of hours total to make, update and repair, done in little fits and starts of just a few hours or days every six months or so. You need to start your portfolio soon, and work on it whenever you create work on a new show or project (or have time to mess with it) to insert it in as an update.

If you poke around this site you will find it also links to some PDF portfolios I post at Issuu. Some employers want PDFs, so having them already posted online is useful.

You will also find l link to some of my mini individual show portfolios at Shutterfly,

and to video content at my YouTube Channel.

These last three (Issuu, Shutterfly and YouTube) cost me nothing at all to operate, though they also take time. So you have many available formats for displaying your portfolio materials online, may of them free to use. Having good material on multiple platforms that can interconnect gives you more exposure and more options of ways to show off your work.

I also built a Makeup Portfolio site on Google Sites to be able to train students how to make a site in that free format:

If you are/were a student at DVC and are looking for images from shows you have worked on, or past classes with me that you have done since 2009 I also encourage you to both go to DVC Drama Photo Archive and Portfolio/Resume Advice a multi year project where I have been uploading photos of past shows at DVC (for use in student portfolios) and advice on how to make different types of them.

You can also join Shutterfly for free so you can download pictures from my TaraMaginnisClasses Shutterfly Share Site for use in your portfolio. (This is actually the main point of this photo share site, so you do not need to ask for my individual permission).

Free Techie/Designer Resume Template (MS Word.doc). This is a great sample resume template for beginning designers and other Theatre Tech emphasis people, created by Kade Mendelowitz , the TD/LD of UAF who is a former colleague of mine. You can download the file and open it in your word processing program to use it. 

Here are some very clear simple basic portfolio how-tos to start you off if you really have no idea what a portfolio is or what to do:

Screen Skills: Build Your Costume Portfolio

How to make a costume design portfolio

In 1975 a Commission of USITT (United States Institute of Theatre Technology) generated a basic text document of Standards of Student Portfolios for all areas of Design/Tech, which tells you what most schools expected of students at different levels as far as physical portfolios around that time. As these guidelines still do apply for print versions to a great extent, this old document was digitized many years later to a PDF and posted because these basics are still in use. USITT currently also does Portfolio Reviews at their annual convention to help students get feedback and improve their hard copy portfolios before they do job interviews.

This shows an annual portfolio review done by a university theatre department for their students:

USITT also has extensive resume advice for technical theatre resumes:

If you do know what one is, and have seen several and are now looking for more guidance, there is much more detailed advice on the Paper Hard Copy Portfolio of a Costumer, as well as the truly excellent Costume Portfolio Website & Blog of freelance costumer Christianne Bakewell, who authored this really excellent portfolio tutorial.

These YouTube Playlists I have made can also help you depending on which type of Costume/Tech/Design portfolio you want to make:

The single thing that helps most with your portfolio is taking lots of pictures and then sorting and organizing them by topic so you can find the ones you need. After that it is just labeling. So if you have access to any stuff you have made, photograph it NOW, and start organizing. Two tutorials I’ve done on how to do this are here:

Photographing Your Costumes For Your Portfolio & Publication Photographing Your Makeup at Home

Free portfolio hosting sites have a variety of styles of presentation that you may prefer, so poking around these places may have you find a free option that suits your aesthetic needs:

If you like WordPress (the free software platform that is used to build this “blog” format site) you might try one of the 11 Free WordPress Hosting Services That Don’t Suck (2020) and start building a portfolio in this format.