Fashion design → Game character art research

Imara van der Wel

Researcher and educator working at the intersection of costume design and game character art. Based in the Netherlands.

Activity
June 2026
Thesis
Costume Design Literacy for Game Character Art Students: A Workshop-Based Investigation
The thesis is complete. It investigates which costume design principles are relevant for game character art education, and how students engage with and apply those principles. The principles that mattered most were construction logic, material and historical context, fabric behaviour, and semiotic thinking. Students did not all translate those the same way. Riggers thought in deformation logic, concept artists in worldbuilding, character artists in construction and simulation workflows.
June 2026
Publication
Designing speculative materials for game characters
My first article for 80.lv, built around the six-step material design framework that came out of the Guild sessions. It walks through how to approach material design for a character with no real-world reference point, using a cold-blooded reptilian researcher displaced into a cold wet climate as the working example. The framework covers everything from physical constraints to cultural logic to how the material actually behaves in simulation.
May 2026
Publication
ArtStation blogs: fabric properties and colour as worldbuilding
Two blog posts published on ArtStation expanding on practical knowledge that came out of the research. The first covers how physical fabric properties translate to digital simulation sliders in Marvelous Designer and CLO3D. The second looks at how colour palette functions as worldbuilding in game character design, arguing that colour choices are never just aesthetic decisions. Both are written for game art practitioners rather than academic readers.
May 2026
Workshop
Guest lecture at HKU
The hands-on textile workshop was delivered for the first time outside BUas, as a guest lecture at HKU University of the Arts Utrecht. Taking the workshop to a second Dutch game art programme was a test of whether the format and content held up in a different institutional context. It did. This was the first step in scaling the research beyond its original setting.
April 2026
Research
Data collection finished
After five Guild sessions and a hands-on workshop, data collection wrapped up in April. The most interesting pattern that kept emerging was that students were not just absorbing costume knowledge. They were running it through their own pipeline role before doing anything with it. The same content landed completely differently depending on whether the student was a rigger, a concept artist, or a character artist. That pattern became one of the four main findings.
March 2026
Workshop
Hands-on textile workshop
A three-hour in-person session at BUas with three activity stations running simultaneously: fabric exploration with thirty labelled samples and five mystery fabrics to identify, a draping and fold challenge with mannequins and mounted spheres, and a patterning station where students assembled flat pattern pieces into three-dimensional garments using tape. What stood out was how quickly physical contact with materials changed how students talked about fabric. Within the first twenty minutes people were using simulation slider terminology to describe what they were feeling in their hands.
Feb 2026
Research
Main data collection begins
The real Guild series started in February, running five online sessions across historical costume periods: an introductory session establishing shared foundations, followed by four periods chosen for their relevance to game character design. Each session alternated between content delivery and structured discussion prompts, which turned out to be one of the things students responded to most. Sessions were recorded and transcribed through Teams, with the transcripts forming the core of the qualitative dataset.
Nov 2025
Research
Test sessions begin
Before the real data collection, three test sessions were run to figure out what worked and what didn't. The first covered garment construction and patterning, the second textiles and natural dyeing, and the third digital fashion tools. The main thing those sessions showed was that students already had more intuition about fabric than they realised. They just didn't have the vocabulary to articulate it yet. That observation shaped how the real sessions were structured.
Sep 2025
Research
Project begins: literature review
The starting point for this project was a gap that seemed obvious once you saw it: film and theatre both professionalized costume knowledge decades ago, and game art education had not. Studios were already hiring costume consultants and using pattern-based tools like Marvelous Designer, which meant they recognised the value, but there was no pedagogical framework for integrating that knowledge into game art training. The literature review built the foundation for what would become the research question.

Publications

Theory sessions

Lecture sessions and presentation materials from the Costume Design Guild series and related research. Click any session to browse the slides.

Additional theory
Historical theory
Testrun series
Costume Design Guild · 2025–2026
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Select a session to load slides.

Workshops

A hands-on workshop exploring costume design principles through physical material engagement, designed for game art students. Click an activity to read how it works.

Deliveries
Guest lectures at Saxion and Hanze
September/October 2026 · Saxion University of Applied Sciences, Enschede · Hanze University of Applied Sciences, Groningen
Hands-on textile workshop planned for delivery at two more Dutch game art programmes in autumn 2026, continuing the scaling of the workshop beyond its original BUas context.
Guest lecture at HKU
May 2026 · HKU University of the Arts Utrecht
Hands-on textile workshop delivered in Dutch as a guest lecture at HKU. The first external delivery of the workshop, scaling the format to a second Dutch game art programme.
Hands-on textile workshop
March 2026 · Breda University of Applied Sciences
The original three-hour in-person session at BUas. Three activity stations running simultaneously, preceded by a theoretical introduction connecting physical fabric properties to the simulation sliders in Marvelous Designer and CLO3D. The workshop on which subsequent guest lectures were based.

About

Imara van der Wel

LinkedIn profile

My research sits at the intersection of costume design and game character art education, an overlap that doesn't get much attention, which is part of why it's interesting.

For my Master's thesis at Breda University of Applied Sciences, I investigated which costume design principles are relevant for game character art students and how they engage with that knowledge when they encounter it. I ran a series of online sessions on historical costume and material theory, followed by a hands-on textile workshop where students worked with fabric samples, mannequins and flat patterns. What came out of the data was not what I expected. Students didn't just absorb the material. They translated it through their own discipline, which generated new ideas and shifted how they thought about their existing work.

That research is now scaling. The workshop that started as a single session at BUas has since been delivered as a guest lecture at HKU, and the underlying framework is finding its way into articles and presentations.

My background is in digital fashion design, with hands-on experience in CLO3D and Marvelous Designer, pattern cutting, and textile knowledge. I came to game art research through that technical foundation, and it shapes how I approach questions about construction, materiality, and what designers actually need to know.

Based in Dordrecht, the Netherlands.