Hello readers! Ana Davidson here, and I’m thrilled to be kicking off my GUS column on one of my favorite parts of preparing for a film or photo shoot: conceptualization.

Between getting hired and having your actors/models fully dressed there are a million things to think about. For a costumer or stylist, conceptualization is usually the first step. Having a well thought out concept is imperative. You will use it to communicate your vision to directors, photographers, and production designers during the initial collaboration process and as a design tool and shopping aid later on. Designating a wall, poster board, or pin board to keep track of the visual representations of your concept is extremely helpful.

A well-rounded concept utilizes at least three different design elements: shape, color, and texture. You will utilize these elements differently on different jobs. For example, on a film you may apply them to specific characters to create a unique look for each character; for an editorial you may use them to convey an overall mood or feeling.

Shape: Shape can communicate many things about a subject in a given moment. When I make concept boards, I sometimes like to apply shape literally, using it to represent a feeling or a personality trait I want to incorporate into my design. Take for example, the triangle. Right side up, a triangle can represent a person whose foundations are very solid. Upside down it can imply that a seemingly confident person is actually teetering on the edge of a breakdown. The most important part of working with shape is transforming a two dimensional element into a three dimensional shape. In 3D, a triangle may be a full skirt, a long jacket that billows out behind someone when they walk, a cape, or even a print. The opposite shape can be achieved with a blazer with a structured shoulder that comes in at the waist.

Color: Color is an essential part of emotional communication and can create cohesion or opposition within a scene or setting. Characters that belong to one family or group may be represented by one color palette, and differing or opposing groups by another. Communicating with color, however, is not always this straight forward. Being aware of color values and their traditional meanings will help you become capable of manipulating color to evoke emotional responses. For example, think about Keira Knightley’s kelly green dress in the movie Atonement. Kelly green is not traditionally a color that screams sex appeal. Yet in this particular case there is so much of it! With color as with so many things, it is important to know the rules so you can know how and when to break them!

Texture: Texture can refer to the fabrics used in a wardrobe, as well as the different feelings they convey. For example, thick, bulky fabrics can convey traditionalism, or rigid values. Thin, flowing fabrics might communicate free spiritedness. Using an organic fabric like cotton versus a man made fabric like neoprene will give the wearer an organic versus an urban look. If you are working on a shoot where the mood is dreamy and fun, it might not be the best idea to use a heavy tweed in your fabric selections. However, tweed could easily be transformed into a fun material, if color and shape are used mindfully to offset its traditional heaviness. Yet another example of knowing how and when to break the rules! Different fabrics also create different shapes so it is important to know your fabrics and keep that in mind.

Shape, color, and texture will remain important throughout the styling process. Next time we’ll talk about taking the work you’ve done during conceptualization and applying it to designing and buying. Until then!

I’m so excited for today’s giveaway from Noonday Collection! I love Noonday Collection not only for their glamorous, dangly earrings that I wore all weekend on our beach trip, but because of their dedication to paying the artisans who make their pieces as well as donating proceeds towards a good cause.

Here’s your chance to win $50 to Noonday and try out their pretty jewelry yourself! Simple head over to Noonday Collection and tell me in the comments which piece you’d like for yourself. My personal pick were the Cluster Earrings but I also love the Mediterranean Sea Earrings as well as the Sapphire Orbit Earrings—and how fun are the Tassel Earrings?

You have until Thursday, May 23 at 5PM to enter and a winner will be chosen at random and announced Friday morning. Good luck!

(Photo of Chelsea from Go Forth Creative from my Instagram. We were shooting this!)

So we’ve gone over how to make a great mood board. And you already know how to get a great instagram shot. Now let’s work on the actual photo shoot itself!

On shoots like the ones I do for CamilleStyles.com, I act as Stylist and Art Director. I used to think Art Director was just a term people threw around that didn’t really mean anything:) but oh, it’s a lot of work. Let’s break it down:

Location, Location, Location
Booking the model and photographer is my first step (yep, that counts as art direction), but luckily I’ve got a lot of great options for both of those here in Austin. After deciding who will do the shoot, I have to determine where it will be. After doing a good handful of shoots, I’ve noticed more and more that I  favor simple backgrounds where the model and accessories are the focal point or really zooming in on details if our background is busy. Having a combination of an interesting space (like a restaurant or shop) coupled with a pretty, simple wall is ideal (more on this in the next Tips and Tricks which will cover post production and photo editing!).

Giving Direction
If it’s your concept, you need to be in control of the shoot and make fast decisions for the team in a clear but calm manner.  This might mean identifying if a certain shot isn’t working and finding another angle or helping the photographer get the right light that they need. I talk to all of my models throughout these shoots, especially because most of them don’t have professional experience. In almost every photo of the models smiling, I’m off camera asking her to look at me and laugh on the spot as if I just said something hilarious:) If it’s your shoot, take the reigns and be clear about what you want with both the model and photographer—it helps everyone. Also, be open to things not going perfectly because something will almost always go wrong: it will be overcast, something won’t fit the model, etc. Roll with it! Shoots are kind of like those 90′s Mentos commercials where someone gets paint on their new suit and then just rolls around in white paint before their job interview and pretends like they bought the suit that way—something unexpected will happen almost every time. Make the most of it and stay positive!

The Devil’s in the Details
Look for everything. This is why it’s great to have a full team on shoots so one person can be focusing on hair while another person is making sure that both sleeves of the model’s shirt are properly cuffed. Somethings just can’t be fixed in Photoshop and it’s so much easier if you look for everything while you’re shooting. Little things to watch out for: reflections of the photographer or stylist in mirrors or reflective windows, tags showing (either on model’s clothes or other pieces if you’re shooting in a store), clean nails for the models (manicures are important for shoots!) unsightly everyday things like air vents, exit signs, etc.

Know Your Photographer
Some photographers like to scope out the location ahead of time, some like to bring extra equipment and some prefer to just work on the fly. Everyone has their own ways of working, so find out how your photographer prefers to work and what they do to get their best shots and help them to do it. It’s helpful also to have a list of shots to show your photographer that you need to get before you begin—do you need full body? Detail? One of just hands? Based on your shoot, let the photographer know your needs ahead of time so that you can work together to have an efficient and successful shoot.

Always Ask Before Shooting
If you’re shooting at a restaurant, bar or other venue, call ahead and make sure it’s okay to shoot there. Sometimes I call ahead and sometimes we just walk by somewhere (like Nau’s in this shoot) and I pop my head in right before we shoot. But you’ll feel a lot better about putting the photos up if you get permission!

Next time on Tips and Tricks: post-production. Stay tuned! 

Happy Friday, friends! Do you have any weekend plans? Adam and I are heading down to the coast after lunch today for a much needed mini vacation. His mom has the cutest condo right on the water and as soon as we get there we always make a batch of beach ‘ritas (“recipe” after the jump) and watch the dolphins swimming and jumping out of the water below. I can’t wait!!

Links for your Friday, including where to get one of these adorable bags, after the jump.

Don’t you love these Julia Marco bags? Julia emailed me the other day to show me her latest items and they’re so cute, I had to share them with you!

My friend Gabriella Ainslie wrote a post for the Design*Sponge Biz Ladies column this week and it’s so good! Gabriella owns Tendenza Consulting and works here in Austin with clients all over the country as a consultant for retailers and makers. If you’re a maker looking to get in more stores or a store looking to get more amazing makers, reach out!

A vintage dress from Lawrence that I love

Homemade horchata

A pretty new peach pouf from ban.do

Gorgeous new work and photographs at Herriott Grace

And now for that beach rita recipe…

1 can of frozen Minute Maid Limeade
Good tequila
Triple Sec
Ice
Salt and lime wedges if desired

Pour limeade mix into a blender. Fill up limeade can with tequila and pour that in blender as well. Fill can up halfway with triple sec and add to blender. Fill blender with ice. Blend. Add lime wedges and a salted rim to your glasses if desired before pouring. 

Happy weekend!

I’d like to start by saying that I cringed as I wrote the title to this post. It brings to mind a funny college student wearing a choker and a beanie (even though it’s warm outside) who probably just got done hacky sacking on the quad. But still, I’m pressing forward because I had an interesting thought the other day:

I used to meditate lot in college when I wore chokers and hacky sacked on the quad (just kidding!! I never hacky sacked and we didn’t have a quad just a park where people sold drugs and nice old men played chess) but I do it less now, mostly because it’s just difficult to find the time. But whenever I take a yoga class, I always relish in those few minutes at the end where you sort of lie there in peace (and sometimes fall asleep on accident—just me?). I used to think of meditating as watching your thoughts go by “as clouds in the sky” because that’s a pretty classic instruction. But the other day, another more helpful analogy occurred to me.

The other morning in my yoga class when we were supposed to be “letting go”, I kept coming back to my to-do lists, worries, weekly errands—all of these things I already knew I had to do or concerns I already knew I had. None of them were new, none of them were things I hadn’t thought of before. In that moment I realized how much we rethink the same things over and over in our minds all our lives—maybe the characters or the scene changes, but the outcome and the feelings rarely do. Our fears, our errands, our to-do lists aren’t ever going to go away and they shouldn’t as they’re part of what keep us engaged, challenged and involved in our own lives. That’s where the flaw is in thinking about these habitual, narrative-like thoughts in our minds as ‘clouds in the sky’—we have no attachment to the clouds, no interest in them. And so it’s hard to liken our intimate, narrative thoughts to something so outside of us.

So instead of clouds in the sky, another image popped into my head from out of the blue and it really truly helped me to let go  because it gave me a reason to let go. Want to hear it?

Imagine you’re walking with the loose leaf pages of a book you’ve read a thousand times. The book is all of your worries, dreams, hopes, fears, to-do lists, errands, relationships and concerns. It’s your fear of flying, your dream job, your hatred of confrontation, your wishlist.  The book is everything in your life that you already know or believe to be true about yourself, your past, your future, your present—it’s everything you think and everything you are and so you cling to it and reread it everyday, a hundred times because it’s the story of you. And now, imagine a breeze comes along, pleasant and gentle, and as it does something in you has the urge to just let go of the pages (try and put your environmental concerns aside as part of the exercise:). And so you do. And as you do, the wind picks up, a wild, blustery thing, and the pages scatter and as they do you lift your face to the sky and all you feel is the sun on your face and the breeze in your hair and for just a moment all of those pages you know by heart are just pages, fluttering around you in the wind. You have no wishlist, no goals or regrets and you see them for exactly what they are which is everything and also nothing at all.

So…do you ever meditate?

PS: More introspective posts.