Author Archives: Shylah

Catching Fire Costume Illustrator, Phillip Boutte, Speaks!

5/1/2013Catching Fire MovieShylah

In a new interview with FrockTalk.com, costume illustrator for Catching Fire, Phillip Boutte,  talks about everything from his inspiration to how he creates his drafts– with some closer looks of the drafts of costumes for both President Snow and Katniss (see below):

So, concept sketch versus a working sketch…

Right.  What I’m starting to see is that costume illustration is shifting to concept art.  The art department has concept artists who design environments.  That’s what people are used to seeing now – it’s what they want to see.  They want to see costume illustration come up to that same level of detail.  In some instances, it’s awesome.  And it’s been really helpful to have realistic costume images that you can plug into the art department paintings, because they can see what the costume is going to look like in the art department environment, and they can get a good sense of the movie.  It really helps sell your ideas.

So let me ask you something… because, what’s tricky is to get a sketch that everybody loves, and everybody signs off on, and then get into a fitting and the actor is like, “Yeah, this is not working”…

Yeah.  That’s something that happens often. We will do tweaks on the illustration.  For the most part, the thing that I found that is difficult is that when you do something digitally, it’s not the actual actors themselves, so you can make them look ways that they would never look in real life.  To combat that, you really have to have a sense of what the actor is already like, and try not to draw anything that you can’t execute.  I find that sometimes if you get these conceptual artists on, especially when they do things before the designer gets there, it really causes a problem.  By the time the designer gets there, they have to figure out what it’s actually going to be on the body –

Not to mention late casting –

Yeah, late casting is a HUGE one, where you’re drawing these things – if you’re drawing the concept of a character that’s not cast at all, and they cast someone who is twenty pounds heavier than what you drew, or they’re way thinner that what you drew, it’s just never going to look the way it looks in the sketch.  That’s the part that we fight against so often.

Here’s some examples of his concept sketches from Catching Fire. Notice how different they look from the design ideas from Hunger Games:

What do you all think about these costumes and the method behind their design? Let us know in the comments!

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