Design Decision Tree

 I'm going to share a bit of my process for making decisions. Lately, I have been assailed by indecisiveness and fretting about costume colors. So, I've sat myself down and did some practical things to help make these decisions. 

Requirements

This will require visual aides so either use a drawing that you will trace and color in or scan in a drawing to manipulate on art software. I use Photoshop but you can use any program that lets you dump colors and change layers. 

Process

Brainstorm: 

Find inspiration based on costume themes or favorite colors or common color compliments for clothes or traditional cultural colors. 

Create a cookie cutter template where you can place the colors generally where they need. If you are doing this physically, make sure the linework is bolded so you can retrace and try other colors. 

Look at them all side-by-side. 

Eliminate first by 'feeling'. "I'm not crazy about this combo." "Not my vibe." "Just not into it."

Then try listing out what works and doesn't work with your remaining choices. Check back in with your feeling after listing these out. Is there something that you like the most? Did one have no drawbacks? 

Consider character: 

Try to develop a character for the costume if you haven't yet. Consider their personality, vibe, occupation, age, and traditions. Do your colors compliment the character? 

Logic:

Start incorporating more logic based things: Does this work with the accessories? Are the colors culturally appropriate? Do I care about accuracy? What is the most important thing I want to convey with this costume? 

Practical: 

How many colors of fabric do I have to buy or make? Will it require special dyes? What is the budget? 

So in short, it goes: Brainstorm - Instinct/Feeling - Pros and Cons - Character - Logic - Practicality. 

Feeling over Logic?

Costumes get finished if you derive some enjoyment from your design. Art can be funny that way. If you work purely on logic you may end up with a design but if you are not excited or interested in it, there's a higher chance of abandoning the project part way through. Or just not loving the final product. 

You could start with the more practical stuff to eliminate faster, but still consider your feelings/creativity. 

Also, you can step away at any point during this process and just sleep on it. Come back and look at things with fresh eyes. 

Fox Maiden Colors Example

Started with the initial brainstorm. 

For this I took the color of the flowers that inspired these costumes. Sakura, Red Maple, Roses, and Apples. 

Left that for a couple days and looked for more inspiration. Made a couple more examples for designs I thought could use some better colors or I wanted to see alternate placements of colors. 

New apple and color swap for yellow rose.

Settled on the Rose theme. Made even more color swatches after more research. 

Decided that for now these were going to be my choices. Now to compare. 

Looked at each color combo and said out loud what I liked about it and what didn't work for me.

Yellow-Red: Incorporates the color of roses well, (yellow, red, pink, white), unusual color scheme, semi-tradition. Felt too "spring" and I want to emphasize fall since this is a Halloween costume. Doesn't jive with the cool color theme of the puppet as well as I like. Feels too "young girl." (This is just a personal feeling.) 

White-Pink-Red: Close to traditional, rose colored. The pale white, yellow, pink blends too much for my liking. I prefer high contrast. 

Red - Yellow - Purple: Fun colors that go well together. More autumn flavored. Feels more "mature". Possibly "too exciting" for the costume as a whole. Doesn't really feel like "roses". 

White - Red - Purple: Good contrast, mix of warm and cool, looks good with the blue and purple, mildly traditional, feels mature. I have an odd feeling about the dark purple. Not as "rose" themed as I'd like. 

White - Red - Pink: Better contrast, traditional looking, Rose colors incorporated. Feels "too young". 

After going through all that, I decided that the Yellow-Red and White-Pink were definitely OUT. No longer in the running. Now I had to pick between the final three. 

I have designed the mask (which also has a couple color variations) and decided to take a look at what outfit looked best with my favorite mask design. 

They all looked pretty good. But I also checked what my other mask colors looked like with each. Here were the best ones. 

Now this is kind of a step backwards because it leads to a bit more indecision rather than narrowing it down. But it did kind of help a bit in a way. 

See, because now the red-purple outfit with the black mask looks the coolest. It's a bit spooky and more aggressive. It's definitely a great combo in my eyes but then I thought about the puppet. In my mind, I'm supposed to be the mild-mannered, mature caretaker of this rascal fox. The red-purple is more of a body guard. I also felt like the costume would be louder than the puppet and detract from the performance. If I was making a black fox puppet, it would look better, but I'm going for silver. 

So because of that I decided it was a choice between the two white masks. 

I'm in love with both of them and I like both mask designs. I do prefer the one with blue flame though. 

But then I went into my FINAL bit of logic. How much fabric would I have to buy and what techniques would I need to use. 

White-Purple: Has 3 fabric colors. No issue with extra special coloring or construction. 

White-Red: Has 3 - 4 fabric colors. The Pink-Red gradient could possibly be done by bleaching/fading the fabric or I could dye pink fabric red. 

Personally, I'm doing enough on this project with the puppet, I'd rather reduce color complications and although I could go with plain red hakama, the fact is I don't want to. So...for now the plan is to go forward with the White-Purple: 

Current winner!