THELMA AFFORD REPORT: SABINA MYERS' DEEP DIVE INTO FIGURE DRAWING

Live Performance designers are very fortunate to have a number of generous benefactors who have left a scholarship for designers as part of their legacy. The Thelma Afford Award, Mike Walsh Fellowship and Loudon Sainthill Scholarship all carry the name of these benefactors, and support a new generation of designers, as does the Kristian Fredrikson Scholarship which was set up by friends and theatre colleagues in his memory.

The APDG has the enjoyable task of managing the Thelma Afford Award. The award is an initiative of the late Thelma May Afford, an Australian designer, theatre performer and journalist. In 1934, she was commissioned to design costumes for the Melbourne centenary pageant, then, in 1936, to design the South Australia’s centenary celebrations and she was later called to Sydney to design the costumes for the sesqui-centenary pageant. She enjoyed costume designing on a large scale and professed that period costumes’ gave a designer more scope than modern clothes.

The Thelma Afford Award for Costume Design in Stage and Screen was established to promote the further study of theatre, film or TV costume design, in various visual dramatic media, for young matriculating high school art students or students from drama and art schools.

In 2024 Costume Designer Sabina Myers was the worthy recipient of the Thelma Afford Award. In the following report Sabina describes some of her study experiences in Italy and Sydney, that were supported by the award…

Thanks to the generous support of the Thelma Afford Award, I was able to undertake two short courses with the aim of expanding my figure drawing skills. I consider illustration to be my most valuable communication tool as a designer, and for costume the human body is the site for a lot of the storytelling I’m doing. I already had a fairly solid foundation in figure drawing, but this was largely self-taught, and I felt that with some more intensive and formalised training I could progress to another level which would support my design practice even further. Of course it’s not easy to find the time or the funding to engage in this kind of professional development normally! So I was very grateful to have this opportunity – it’s something I couldn’t have done without the support of this award.

The first course I attended was the Summer Anatomy Intensive at the International Centre for the Arts in Monte Castello di Vibio (Italy), which I attended in August 2025. I flew into Rome and spent a few days getting over the jet-lag while absorbing (sketchbook in hand!) several museums and centuries worth of Italian painting and sculpture, where artists have captured the human form in such shocking scale and accuracy it left me needing a glass of wine to recover.

Thus inspired, I travelled to Monte Castello di Vibio, is a tiny 15th C hilltop town in Umbria, which has a dwindling population and almost zero tourism except for the mix of international artists brought by the art school. In this quiet and isolated environment, with glitchy wifi and no mod-cons, I felt free from all distractions, and for 10 days the routine was waking early, walking a circuit around the old walls of the town, and then heading to the studio where we were painstakingly studying the skeletal and muscular systems of the body. We used the school’s collection of models and real specimens, and producing annotated drawings to record the details. Every night we’d reconvene on the rooftop of the school for a group dinner, shared with many artists beyond our small anatomy class, who were visiting on other residencies and courses, and had such diverse interests. I think one of the great things about designing for theatre is that we are always borrowing from other artforms, other disciplines, other eras, and the opportunity to spend time around other creatives here probably had equal value to what I learned in the pursuit of rigorous anatomical knowledge.

After returning from Italy, I certainly felt I’d achieved the goal of increasing my technical ability in drawing the body. The second course I undertook (in January 2026) had slightly different aims and was much closer to home – ‘Figurative and Performative Drawing’ with Todd Fuller at the National Art School (Darlinghurst), had a focus on capturing the body in motion. This class proved a very important counterpoint to what I had been focusing on – I think the risk of spending so much time on rigid anatomy is that drawings, while becoming more accurate, can become rather stiff. This course was an antidote to that, and it forced me to apply my knowledge of the figure in looser, faster, and more experimental ways. Many of the exercises consisted of trying to capture a model, musician, or dancer, who was in constant motion. In a room of 12 artists, everyone was finding different strategies and techniques to express the subject and their choreography – hugely inspiring.

After these experiences I feel I’ve stepped into 2026 with a renewed passion for the work I’m doing and the way I express my ideas on paper. My drawing practice feels very grounded in knowledge, but there’s also a freedom that comes from that confidence, and that’s making my whole workflow as a designer more enjoyable. I’m so grateful for these opportunities, and I hope other designers reading this might be encouraged to apply for this award!

Learn more about Sabina’s design practice by visiting her website HERE