Inspiration and Innovative Approach in Creating Textile Designs and Prints from Sekondi-Takoradi’s Masquerade Costume Designs

Masquerade culture is an essential part of Sekondi-Takoradi cultural embodiment. The masquerade festival titled Ankos displays interesting costumes that have artistic elements of potent colour display and performances. The masquerade costumes manifest intricate fabric decoration techniques for example pleating, folding, gathering, smocking, hand and machine stitching and the use of varied colour schemes. These decorative techniques make costume production laborious, tedious and downtime constraints. In contributing to the innovative approaches to creating textile designs and prints, the study explored the inspirational possibilities of surface designs of the masquerade costume for textile designs and prints. The art-based research design and direct observation as research instrumentation were employed in the artistic creation for the study. Adobe Photoshop was used in the simulation design processes. The study revealed that the simulation design processes produced an innovative imitated visual appearance of the masquerade costume and production processes from a machine-stitched work to a hand-printed fabric. It is recommended that costume makers adopt the contemporary possibility of using hand screen to print hitherto the traditional laborious and tedious process of producing masquerade costumes.