Photos from the practical component of my MFA costuming thesis - a partial suit of (prop, absolutely

Photos from the practical component of my MFA costuming thesis - a partial suit of (prop, absolutely zero combat potential, unfortunately) early Timurid style armor. Modeled by Xiaoyi Zha, one of the opera grad students who was very kind to endure wearing a quilted coat in June in Illinois so @axonsandsynapses​ could take pictures.The Timurid period is super interesting aesthetically because it involved a blending of Persianate and Mongolian styles across the middle east and central Asia. I was interested in the reign of Amir Timur himself (1370-1405), and there are no surviving armor pieces definitively traced to that time period, so my research was a lot of illuminated manuscripts, which I compared to similar extant styles of armor to see what made sense as far as construction.I’ll spare you my whole essay, but here’s a couple nice paintings that show what I was working with (these skew early and make me look like a bad researcher but here the thing…I just want to show off my favorites):Isfandiyar’s first labour: he fights the wolves, from a Shanameh of Firdawsi. Tabriz, c. 1370.Folio from the Great Mongol Shahnama: Ardashir Battles Bahman, Son of Ardavan. Tabriz, c. 1335.Bahram Gur Slays a Dragon, from the Great Mongol Shahnamah. Tabriz, 1330-1336. I love this one so much I can’t express it, I mean just look at that dragon. Look at those weird plants. I’m gonna scream! Art!!I had grand plans for laser cutting and vacuum forming a lot of this, but the plague kicked me out of the costume shop and I had to finish in my apartment, so this build ended up being a return to my cosplay roots in a big mess of plastic sheet, craft foam, cardboard, and paper mache.  There’s a little bit of Wonderflex and resin, but…this is mostly made out of trash.  My big experimental tech thing turned out to be tracing embellishments from extant art in Illustrator and cutting them out by Cricut, which worked pretty well!But now you know all the good bits of this are cereal boxes :>--source link

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