Digital Drapery

Digital Barbie's Magic Paintbrush

Annabelle Zhang
MDes Mediums 2025
Yilin Li
HGSE/ LDIT 2024
Fatima Mamu
MDE 2025
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1 Light Gauze Floral Dress

The childhood memory of watching Barbie effortlessly manifest dresses with a magic paintbrush in the classic film Barbie as Rapunzel has stayed with us. We are particularly inspired by the scene where Barbie uses a magic paintbrush to paint on herself and create various dresses. The geometric dress she paints is especially memorable - it has a futuristic style with angular patterns and shapes. This sparks our imagination and we set out to recreate that imaginative experience by digitally designing our own magic brush. We sketched out some basic frameworks for the dress skeleton and used Fologram to simulate the strokes of a paintbrush. Finally we played with different possibilities of the paintbrush to create our futuristic dresses.

Project video
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2 Layered Teal Octahedron Dress
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3 Pleated Inky Gothic Dress