- In this special edition of "ARTEFFECTS," designing 18th-century shoes with a modern approach.

(classical music) - When you get a design just right, it is amazing because it's beautiful and it's exactly the right thing at that moment.

(classical music) - [Beth] The intricacy behind Native American beadwork - [Teresa] So when I'm coming up with beadwork designs, I often first start with the essence of the the piece.

(upbeat music) - [Beth] Hand-painted signs and designs explode with nostalgia.

- I try to create almost like a little fantasy world.

I think people enjoy the vintage aesthetic, or style, or look.

(country music) - [Beth] And the iconic work of Reno Artist John Schmitz.

- As you get older, you start to lose your vision, and everything gets a little soft and fuzzy.

That's nature's Photoshop, little airbrush look too.

(bright music) - It's all ahead on this compilation of "ARTEFFECTS" around the nation.

(gentle upbeat music) - [Announcer] Funding for "ARTEF is made possible by Sandy Raffealli with Bill Pearce Motor (upbeat music) Meg and Dillard Myers, in memory of Sue McDowell, the Carol Franc Buck Foundation, Chris and Parky May, and by the annual contributions of PBS Reno members.

(gentle music) - Hello, I'm Beth MacMillan and welcome to "ARTEFFECTS."

Did you know that "ARTEFFECTS" is part of a national arts content sharing initiative?

Each week, a few art segments from select PBS stations around the country are chosen and distributed to other participating PBS stations?

We are proud to say that many "ARTEFFECTS" segments have been selected and nationally distributed.

In this compilation episode, we will look at the "ARTEFFECTS" that have been downloaded the most by other PBS stations.

First up, dressing up in beautiful and historically accurate clothing of the 18th century is a passion for Lauren Stowell of Reno.

More than 10 years ago, she found herself searching for historically accurate shoes to complement the dresses she spent months creating.

When she couldn't find what she needed, this artisan took matters into her own hands, and American Duchess was born.

(classical music) - American Duchess is a small company that makes new old shoes.

We take a really old design, something you see in a painting or in a museum, and we make it work for modern wear and comfort expectations.

Everything from the 18th century, 19th century, and 1920s, '30s, and '40s as well.

(classical music) America just started as my personal blog on historic costuming.

I liked to make things, I would make those things for myself and wear them to an event, a picnic, or a dance.

It's just what I did for fun.

And I thought I'll blog about my experiences so that other people who have no idea how to make a wig or how to do this dress.

I can learn from my mistakes, and it's always been about sharing my mistakes and learning that way.

You don't wanna put all this time, and effort, and sometimes a lot of money into your beautiful dress and then have no shoes to wear with it because it crushes the illusion.

(classical music) - When you're creating these gowns, they are art pieces.

And if you don't have the right shoes, it just kills it.

And when you take those photos of yourself or someone's taking photos of you and you look at those later, you wanna be able to say, "I look like I walked out of a portrait."

- You're not gonna achieve that with tennis shoes under your dress.

Believe me, I've seen it.

(playful music) Historic shoes are not like shoes today.

They have strange closures, they have specific toe shapes or lack of toe boxes.

They're very, very different.

So nobody was really making that kind of thing.

And I thought, "Well, okay, maybe I'll have a go and make some shoes."

Not by hand, I couldn't make enough of them to make a living doing that.

So I found a manufacturer and we developed a prototype.

I put it on the internet, and did a pre-order, did a crowdfunding campaign, and it funded overnight.

Like overnight, we had enough money to do the production run.

And it was like, "Oh, my God."

I woke up in the morning like, "Oh.

Oh, this is the thing.

Okay, I'm gonna do this, this is what I'm gonna do."

(uplifting music) Our first design was Georgiana named after the Duchess of Devonshire.

It was made out of dyeable satin It was our first go, people were excited about it, I was excited about it, and it worked.

(playful music) We just kept producing like the next one, the next one, the next one.

(playful music) A typical 18th-century shoe.

The most characteristic hallmark that you might see on those are latchet with buckles.

So this is the way that 18th-century shoes closed.

You have these two straps.

You put one strap through here, you stick the prongs through the other one.

You can make them as tight as you want so you can keep tightening them.

And it makes your shoes look very pretty.

(playful music) Historical accuracy is very, very, very important.

(playful music) - So the basic process starts with looking at original shoes, whether through photographs.

- It's brainstorming, so we just kind of all get together and go, "What sounds cool?

What have we not made before?

What are the trends in the community?"

(playful music) A lot of it is research, looking at old magazine ads, catalogs, original shoes, and our collections.

- I've gone to a number of different museums and study things hands-on, so that way I have an understanding of how they're constructed and what goes into the internals of them and things of that nature.

All of that research gets done gradually as we find inspirations.

Say we need a boot for this time period, and we go and find lots of different examples, and pick what ones really speak to us, what we think would translate well to a modern design.

And from there, we do a lot of sketches, a lot of ideations, and then actually come up with the formal line drawing.

And we put little tiny details of the sole should be this many millimeters, this eyelet should be this many millimeters wide, all the little tiny details in there.

So that way, the first sample that we get back is as close as we can get to right.

- There is nobody who knows about historic shoes and how to make them better than Nicole Rudolph.

- When I was at Colonial Williamsburg, I ended up learning how to do women's shoemaking in the proper 18th-century-style All by hand, no machines, all hand-stitched and assembled.

(playful music) - We're based here in Reno, and this is where we do all of the design.

All the marketing and advertising happens here as well We also pack ship and do logistics out of here.

So there's a great big warehouse attached to this little tiny off We do everything, except the actual manufacture of our footwear.

95% of the world's shoes are made in Houjie.

It is in South China.

There are millions of people in Houjie, and it's a city that is built for shoe production, factories, components markets, leather producers, just everything you need.

So that's where we also manufacture our shoes.

The people that we work with there are amazing.

We produce fantastic shoes in China because I get on a plane and I go over there, and I make sure our quality processes are in place, and that our materials are good, and that our relationship with our manufacturer is good.

(lively music) - They really are, unto themselv a sculptural, interesting piece of artwork.

And they should stand on their own before you even put them on your feet.

And then to add that in, to add the whole costume, and to add the clothes, the dresses, everything, it just ends up completing the whole thing.

(lively music) - There are so many people in the world that are into historic costuming or they're movie costumers, or stage costumers.

That's a whole market I never even thought about when we started.

I was just making shoes for people like me.

It's about helping other members of the costuming community be their best selves in the 18th century or the 19th-century to make their most beautiful dress and impression or character.

We wanna create a fun environment to help people have a good time playing dress up.

(lively music) - To learn more about these modern historic shoes, visit american-duchess.com.

Powwow regalia is an extremely important aspect for all Native American dancers.

The regalia is worn with pride and combines historical ancestry with personal taste.

There are many different styles of regalia dress, and in this segment, we learn about the dedication and importance of one particular style from a Reno-based artist.

(mellow music) - My favorite form of Indigenous artwork is beadwork.

I really enjoy beading, I find it relaxing.

I enjoy thinking about the designs and the type of materials that I want to use, the look that I wanna create.

I also really enjoy making beadwork because it's functional artwork.

(Teresa laughing) Beadwork is a form of traditiona Native American artwork.

So anywhere around the country, as you visit different tribal na you'll see different styles of beadwork.

I've been making beadwork since I was about 15, and usually when I design beadwork and I create beadwork, it's for use for cultural events or ceremonies, or powwows.

So I'm a pow dancer, I'm a fancy shawl dancer.

I like to dance jingle and traditional from time to time too.

But my kids and I, we pow dance.

And so a lot of the beadwork that I make is for our powwow outfits or our regalia.

(lighthearted music) So when I'm coming up with beadwork designs, I often first start with the essence of the piece.

So I'm really thinking about the person that I'm designing for, and then the use of the final product and the look that I want to create.

(lighthearted music) I like to lay everything out on graph paper and then I'll translate that paper to material, and I'll sew it down to the material so that I have a pattern to work with, and then just start beading.

(lighthearted music) Beadwork is incredibly time-consuming.

As you look at these different beaded pieces, you know that each one of those beads was hand-sewn on.

Different artists will have their own techniques, and so I like to put on four bea and then go back through two.

Every single bead is touched by their artist at least once but sometimes multiple times, depending how they tack it down.

And so the larger pieces, they could have hundreds of hours of man time.

I would say one of my favorite parts about beading is watching the piece come together 'cause you have this vision.

And a lot of times, your vision is pretty true to the final product, but sometimes it's not.

And so it's fun watching the piece come together, but actually seeing the colors come together and the designs come together, it's really exciting and it provides me a lot of motivation because I'll be like two more ho and I can have this piece comple and I can finally see what it's gonna look like.

(lighthearted music) When I make beadwork, I make it for really specific purposes.

So my husband and I got married about seven years ago.

I wore a traditional Woodland outfit for our wedding, and then my husband wore traditional Pyu outfit for the wedding.

And then our daughters, they wore some beaded pieces also.

My 14-year-old, her name is Siyabi, which means wild rose.

And so you'll see in those piece that there's a image of a rose.

And then Pasitiva, our little one, her name is wild iris.

And so there's a iris beaded into her hair ties.

And then in my Bandelier bag, there's several different flowers that are beaded in that.

You know, there's a flower that represents me, my favorite flower, and then my husband's favorite flower.

And there's a hummingbird which symbolizes love.

And then going up the straps are the flowers of our kids.

So Busceppi, his name is red Ear I beaded a red star-like flower (lighthearted music) One of the pieces I brought was the medallion I made when I graduated with my bachelor's degree.

I went to Michigan State Univers The medallions in the shape of the Spartan S with a little sash across with an abbreviation SOC for sociology.

And then the year I graduated, because I graduated with a bachelor's degree in sociology.

(lighthearted music) So it's common in Indigenous artwork to see things like that that are symbols that are very specific to that individual or specific to that ceremony.

All of my beadwork that I create has a lot of symbolism.

(lighthearted music) It feels good to wear our traditional artwork because I know it comes from a special place, I know that there's a lot of meaning behind the pieces, but I also think it's important as Americans that we see the Indigenous people who live here and who've always lived here.

Here in Nevada, there are 27 federally recognized tribes.

That's a lot of tribes.

(Teresa laughing) That's a lot of tribes.

Most states don't have 27 federally recognized tribes.

Sometimes, when we think about Indigenous cultures or Indigenous arts, we think about them as history, something that's in the past, and something that's not current There's all kinds of beautiful w that's being done by artists around the country, whether capitalizing on contemporary materials, themes.

It's beautiful to see art evolving, even Indigenous art, 'cause what's Indigenous is also contemporary.

(ambient music) - And now it's time for this week's art quiz.

"ARTEFFECTS" was started in 2016 and quickly became PBS Reno's most award-earning series.

It has more than nine seasons with over 240 locally produced arts segments.

How many of these arts segments have been distributed nationally throughout the Arts Content Sharing Initiative?

Is the answer A, 50; B, 80; C, 125; or D, over 150?

And the answer is D, over 150.

For sign painter Derek McDonald, it's all about vintage design.

Over 10 years ago, this artist quit his day job in Reno and began painting designs full- using only traditional technique That means no computers, no repr just paintbrushes and pencils resulting in a timeless design.

(pensive traditional music) - I describe my work as traditio vintage-inspired, and historic.

I pretty much keep it, for lack of better term, all old-school.

My name is Derek McDonald, and I'm a sign painter.

I was the quintessential creativ that would flip over his math te and draw silly pictures on the b And I was also, and still am, into old cars.

So I started going to all these and I saw lots of pinstriping on motorcycle tanks, and hot rods, and blow riders, and I started getting really int And that led me into the world of lettering signs because they're very parallel wo And that's basically how I dived (upbeat music) I just genuinely was really into with a historic feel or a vintage kind of feel to it.

(gentle upbeat music) When I begin to work on a projec the most important step is breaking into my reference ma I've got really old rare sign painting manuals, and trade books, and magazines, old yellow page books.

They have great illustrations.

I collect vintage matchbooks.

Right now, I have over 700, and each one of them has awesome really inspiring artwork on them I'll jot off three or four sketches, I'll refine it, and then I make the sign.

(gentle music) Materials I work with vary.

Of course, my main thing is pain and that's a very specific paint designed for industrial art.

So it's oil-based, it's called lettering enamel.

(gentle music) When I work with glass on a storefront window, I try to create almost like a little fantasy world, even if it's just one window, and one storefront, and somebody's just gonna walk by it for eight seconds, at least I created that little tiny fantasy world for just that short amount of time for that person.

And they might look at something and go, "That's the way they used to do things."

So it all kind of comes back to that nostalgic feeling.

(suspenseful music) Not only do I go paint glass windows on site, but I'll also do pieces in my sh My shop is based right here in R (gentle upbeat music) So let's assume I'm gonna make your traditional wooden sign that's gonna hang over a storefr I'll have to go to my scrap wood which is in my garage right now.

I've got tons of old signboard.

(machinery whirring) I'll hand-cut the boards, I'll edge seal them, prime them, and then base coat them.

(gentle upbeat music) These were blue-collar, get-it-out-the-door things back in the day.

Some of these shops were union, and they would have 10 sign painters all in the line, and they were knocking out these And you can see they developed these techniques over years, and years, and years where they can get a really effi or a really efficient letter pai in a very short amount of time.

There's just a certain feel to some of these signs, where you go, "That's 1930s sign right there."

You'll see these certain characteristics in the letters where they would pull the brush and flick the brush out at the v and you'll see these little brush flick outs.

That was a speed and efficiency You only see that in those old vintage signs.

(gentle upbeat music) One of my favorite things to work on is old vehicles, up close and personal with old t doing lettering jobs on old truc I have a buddy who's a vintage truck collector, and he bought this truck from a old fellow in Idaho.

It's a 1959 Chevy Stepside truck (car door slamming) So I'm gonna paint Declo Cattle and a big black-and-white cow.

Then, I'm gonna do the process of aging the sign back.

(pensive music) So the process of creating an aged sign or a distressed sign is a multi-step process.

I kind of thin the paint down a little bit.

I put a little bit of talcum powder into the paint.

It actually flattens the sheen so it won't be super high gloss, and the paint will be kind of di so it's not very opaque, so it's already kind of transluc Once it's dry, then I just start wiping back with some solvents, like acetone or mineral spirits, and you start rubbing back on th and you follow the same directio that your brush strokes go.

That way, you reveal back the actual brush strokes.

(country music) What I really get out of the end of the day is creating that nostalgic feeli And when I think I've really nai that's the biggest reward I get.

(country music) - To learn more about Derek McDo visit goldenwestsignpainter.com.

Up next, we meet Reno artist Joh who creates airbrushed artwork.

Like a favorite song that brings back old memories, his iconic depictions of Western pop culture invoke a sense of vintage Americ (upbeat music) - The artistic mediums I work in are acrylic paints with airbrush and I sharpen my paintings with a paintbrush.

The way the airbrush works is it's powered by a compressor and you put your paint into the device, the airbrush, and it's powered by air through and it's all coming off the tip of a needle.

So the paint is atomized or pushed through the needle onto the canvas.

(upbeat music) (spray hissing) It is a very nice medium, and the advantage to using an ai over a traditional brush would be that you get seamless b You can get blends, nice gradients and skin tones, skies, clouds.

You get that soft nature look that's in nature.

As you get older, you start to lose your vision, and everything gets a little soft and fuzzy.

That's nature's Photoshop.

Little airbrush look, too.

(upbeat music) I would say my artwork is definitely Americana because it's pop culture, it's now and then, it's people y or people you've seen, or maybe even places you know.

(upbeat music) The types of clients I've had have been Elvis Presley Enterpri I've did 36 Kenny Rogers murals that were in all of his restaura I've done a lot of movie theater and a lot of amusement parks, a lot of really big, large-scale mural work, mainly with the airbrush.

That's another reason why I use is because it covers a lot more than you could with the paintbru depending on the size of job you're working on.

I like to paint landscapes too with the airbrush because that can get the sky to look like the sky, not that anybody who... You don't have to use an airbrush to make it that way.

It just happens to be my medium.

Some of the paintings I have that have so many angels is probably because they were commissioned by an angel, which is my wife.

She's the one who loves the ange So anything with an angel on it, it's like the Bouguereau picture I do and things like that.

She's the one who really likes t (upbeat music) I've been to airbrushing since I and when I first started airbrus I was really in love with it because everything was so seamle It was like, how did they get that smooth look on there?

And in the early days that I was I was seeing a lot of album cove mostly album covers, movie poste anything that looked good.

You could paint neon, chrome, a lot of that.

So I chose to try to follow that, and still to this day, like to airbrush whatever I can.

But in today's world, not many people airbrush as much as they used to, especially in illustration, and advertising, and art because the computer is more eff So airbrush seems like it's a little old hat now.

Not as many people do it, but the car industry still does a lot of it.

I mean, here in Reno, we have the Hot August Nights.

You see beautiful artwork done.

A lot of it with an airbrush on So that's an industry that hasn't let go of it.

(upbeat music) Some people look at me and they say, "You still doing that?"

You know, it's like, "Why are you still doing that?"

So I just...

I have a paint-stained life, and that's part of it.

(upbeat music) When I do a painting I've gotten to in recent years where I don't finish the paintin I like to leave my hand in it so you can tell it was made with because I used to show my work to people and they say, you're a good photographer.

And I said, "These aren't photographs, they're paintings."

They look closer and then you ca So my favorite thing to do is to where you can tell somebody drew you can tell somebody painted it, it's not photorealistic.

(upbeat music) You let the paint do the work fo It's like you let things happen.

You don't have a plan.

You don't have a plan, you start to push paint around, it starts to look right.

You know when to leave it long because I learned something very early in life.

It takes two people to do a great painting, and that's one person to do it and the other to tell them when because you can't romance the stone forever.

You gotta know when to quit.

(upbeat music) - And that wraps it up for this compilation of "ARTEFFECTS" around the natio If you want to watch new "ARTEFFECTS" segments early, make sure you subscribe to the PBS Reno YouTube channel and don't forget to keep visiting pbsreno.org to watch complete episodes of "ARTEFFECTS."

Until next week, I'm Beth MacMil Thanks for watching.

- [Announcer] Funding for "ARTEF is made possible by Sandy Raffealli with Bill Pearce Motor (upbeat music) Meg and Dillard Myers, in memory of Sue McDowell, the Carol Franc Buck Foundation, Chris and Parky May, and by the annual contributions of PBS Reno members.

(upbeat music)