Roulette Productions Brunch
July Eighteenth Twenty Twenty Six
Two shows in a month! With two hand sewn outfits! Rogue started producing a monthly Brunch Hour and after becoming the head backstage kitten of Roulette Hour I got familiar with the needs of Rogue, Khloe, and Thundertron (the three producers of the show). So I began helping with this monthly show. There is no theme for the show so I needed something quintessentially Donbalian while still being on theme for breakfast. I love being on meta theme for an event, so I sketched up an outfit that truly would be on theme, a breakfast bandit. Because I was really there to steal a good ass breakfast monthly. I mean obviously help Rogue monthly as well. So I modified the previous outfit's pattern and made my own original pattern based on my body measurements. I wanted the arm flaps to remind me of syrup, and I obviously wanted a fork element to show I'm there to steal your food. This outfit took around 2 days to complete which, is honestly very quick. I learned a lot about making quality sewing in a time crunch and how to make designs that show off a concept while limiting details that will get lost. You can see in the concept how I removed some aspects that wouldn't be visual on a single glance. This marks a transition boundary between old and new Donbalian. Out with the clown, and in with the Demon. 10/10.
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Summer Camp
July Eleventh Twenty Twenty Six
I fell before pride and I don't know what this was. What a fabulous costume. I made this costume from a pattern for a Victorian bathing suit and it looks wonderful! I really appreciate the entire look from head to toes and this is probably the only look that could replace my gremlin look on my phone background (so far). I made this outfit in exactly one day because I got back from a trip and needed something to wear for that weekend. So I took an edible and got to work. The theme was summer camp so clearly I wanted a vampire look to compliment my werewolf looks previously. I ended up going with a vampire beach walker, aka Nosferatu Beach Party attendee and I'm pleased with how this entire outfit came out. What I am not pleased about is how cursed this weeks show was. Pretty much everything that could go wrong went wrong. Heels breaking, wardrobe malfunctions, wig reveals not even making it to the show, and to kick it off I wanted a fun show so I jumped on a bar table, only to find getting off harder than expected, I learned that lesson as I was plummeting to the ground. Got a face bruise but loved that night. 9/10 would recommend getting another face injury. If you're wondering how I get inspirations for some of these looks, I got inspiration from playing Paralives and making my drag character as a Para.
Pattern Link
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Pride
June thirteenth Twenty Twenty Six
Before the Pride, came the downfall, after the fall we were coastin! What a fun time this look turned out to be. The entire outfit was an entirely new purchase for me (often my previous looks were other pieces I had with new additions I made) and I loved how it turned out. I wanted a kink themed pride costume and what better way than combining bunnies, which in media are fertility icons, and a maid costume, a role often seen as being submissive to another human. I wanted to take this submissive bunny to a fun place and make her the aggressor often punishing those who make other's lives hard. This was a very unique show, lots of new faces and unfortunately two other kittens got hate crimed and followed on the way out of the event. This was one of two hate crimes I saw that week. This evening really reinforced how much community right now matters and how it's important to be weird and different especially to the people who hate you the most. 9/10 look and yet another cornerstone (community strength) I also made a gif of myself!
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Monsters
May nineth Twenty Twenty Six
From high highs, to low lows. This is an outfit I describe as my lost photo month. I recorded my usual video to get photos for a poster and remembrance of the look I made, however, I hate everything below the neck. This may be one of the only places I'll post this outfit online. This look made me realize I really needed a body morph suit for my outfits, I really disliked how my tattoos would show under the outfit in addition I was not liking how male presenting clothes made my body look. I made the head mask in around 2 days, one day for paper mache, one day for painting. The mask is inspired by decaying werewolves and I wanted a statement on how the wolves of wall street are both starving and gorging themselves however, this totally missed the mark. In addition to this look I also had a fake wolf penis I wore with the outfit. I learned a lot from this look and this may be one of my other cornerstone (strong cartoon-esque character design) looks that made me hone in on what I actually want my character to look like. Overall 2/10.
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Photos by Me and @EyesofJem on insta
Disney VS Dreamworks
April Eleventh Twenty Twenty Six
This looks a double feature creature! I was both performing and being the lead kitten for the Roulette Hour during this performance so it was important to me that the audience did not see my full outfit until my performance time. The Armenian Taraz inspired head dressing for my actual performance was a re-purposing of a previous attempt at a Taraz for visiting a Dragula event, you absolutely cannot see the top of it but essentially I embroidered an eye on the head dressing then I have red beading I made going down and around. This was my first ever 100% political performance. I am so sick and tired of the American empire killing so many lives both here and off shores that I essentially just made a rant piece that fit the theme of the event and how I am feeling in these months. The monologue ended up being nine minutes, which, was very long for the audience and I ended up with multiple versions and I recorded and editing the final version the night before the performance then spending all the next morning memorizing it. The original attempts at this monologue are in the drive and you can tell by the naming I wanted to be be a song at first, before I realized I did not know anything about song producing. For my kitten look I have a simple black hat with my black and red cape, I received that cape from a coworker who received it from a previous coworker, and it had some nasty energy on it when I received it. Both looks are the beginnings of what the core of what I want my drag to look like begin to form. This was also the first time I went from making digital art pieces with my outfit photos to making "posters" with my outfits. I like the idea of taking an outfit I'm proud of and making some kind of lore or additional content with that outfit. This is also the first time my logo appears! I'm very proud of this logo, It's my Drag name's abbreviations in the Armenian Alphabet R and D with about a million ways to look at the logo and analyze it (I'm genuinely really proud of it and I think it's better observed than talked about). Overall a solid 9/10, once again I pushed myself into realizing myself and pushing my ability to produce a new form of media in a short amount of time. This felt like a cornerstone performance (political activism and my cultural roots) for me. Fun fact. The gremlin poster is still my phone background
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Night of One Thousand Masks
March Fourteenth Twenty Twenty Six
This was my first ever night of kittening (assisting with the performers backstage), I was definitely unsure what I should even wear and how big I should go. The process of this outfit creation was essentially this: OH fuck the show is in five hours what should I wear. So I threw on a basic (basic for me) skirt, my pseudo-Victorian blouse that I hate and I am using any excuse to wear, and random decor items. I knew I wanted to were some kind of mask so I chose the only wearable mask I had (a raven obviously) and worked around the idea of a shapeshifting druid come to help the performance. The face paint is supposed to resemble a birch tree but I honestly wish I did a raccoon afterwards since that would be a double masked idea. The main reason I went with a birch tree however was because the setting powder I bought fucking lied that it was transparent when it was in fact, peach, so I had to come up with a face themeing that matched the weird pink blotches all over my face. Fun fact, pretty much everything I'm wearing in this outfit is pieced from some decor in my apartment. The mask was a gift from a friend that visited New Orleans, the ivy is part of my fish tank decorations, the tail was actually my first ever purchase at a Ren Faire and it is a real fox tail, then my pouches and belt are from a DND campaign that I used to run. Fun fact I'm actually in two different YouTube DnD campaigns that I will never send links to because I think it's more fun that way. If I were to rate this look it's a solid 7/10, passible and I learned a lot about white foundation work. This is also one of the first looks where I really started to dislike seeing my bare skin since it ruined the illusion I wanted.
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My Backdoor is Always Open
February Fourteenth Twenty Twenty Six
This performance was my first reintroduction back into drag after years of not performing (I would post my original drag photos but that was from when I was a minor and, yea no I'm not posting that), I originally quit drag as drag for me was always political, it was a way to question the societal rules that we had around us and I found most drag I saw to be too corporate for my tastes, my drag family, the Haus of Pearl, and Dragula really brought that love of drag back to life after ten years of neglecting it. I chose this song because it explores the love and acceptance of sexuality in women while owning and controlling that sexual desire to it's maximum extent possible, essentially a woman who vaginatized (pussmatized?) an entire town. Just like how my fake butthole was stretched to the maximum extent possible. I crocheted that hole out of cheap polyester yarn and adorned it with 3 handmade (fake) pearl strings, however, much like real life my cum pearl strings broke everywhere in the car just outside the bar and I was left with only one left when I actually performed. As for the outfit, I handmade the entire outfit from a polyester silk imitation that cost me two dollars a yard. As for the fringe at the bottom of the dress that was somehow seven dollars a yard which essentially tripled the cost of the entire outfit. I thought about making the fringe myself as it's not a hard process but the way the material reflects in the light made me fall in love with it. As for the actual dress pattern itself I wanted a look that was an homage to Elvira while keeping some of the elements from the "husband killer" dress aesthetic (pattern link down below). I originally wanted to get a modest breastplate and designed the entire outfit around that chest width. However, seeing my drag grandmother Khloe Quarterpounder perform really made me want to essentially quadruple the size of my titties, so I hand sowed button holes and buttons to help adjust the chest size without altering the size of the dress too much. Unfortunately, I do need to tailor the dress to that breastplate much more than I actually did and you can see in the video that often times the silhouette is not as flattering to the breastplate size as it could be. As for the performance itself I'm genuinely pleased with it and love it. Whenever I preform I essentially listen to that one song on loop the entire week before the performance to the point where I hate listening to that song, and that's when I know I'm ready to perform as I know pretty much every word at that point. The one part that could be improved was the ending reveal of the fake butthole, and luckily my drag grandmother Rogue Roulette was there to help me show it off. I personally enjoy how expressive this version of my makeup was and the emphases on cheek details played an important role in shaping my makeup dynamic in the future. I realized very quickly that my makeup could really bring out how naturally expressive I am. This performances makeup is also when I knew I wanted my drag name related to my Armenian last name however I was unsure if I wanted my drag persona to be formally Armenian as well, I enjoy playing with a clown concept, however I find that I don't often wish to be described as a clown drag monster if I want to focus mainly on exploring the reinterpretation of historical and modern Armenian art. One idea I originally had for my performances was making yarn based wigs as I wanted a "crafty" look to my character, this is something I still think about however I find that each yarn wig I attempt to make does not have the color, texture, and shape that I would enjoy to perform in, they often feel too stiff for comfort. I made a red yarn wig that I scrapped and attempted to reuse for my puppets wig for my Disney and Dreamworks performance to little success. I also often float the idea of going completely wigless to myself as I personally enjoy a stylized hijab for my persona's aesthetic. Though a nice red Ronald McDonald wig does look fucking good on me. If you're wondering why I paint black under my chin it's to mimic my face being surrounded by fabric when I'm not wearing a hijab or face shroud (and it helps define my round face). Overall I would give this performance a solid 9/10, I appreciate my ambition by not only sewing my entire outfit, but also crocheting and trying to make a wig from scratch in the span of five days. I also enjoyed the exploration of my personal aesthetic and my ability to just try something out without it being too serious.
Pattern Link
Performance Video and Photo Drive
Photos by EyesOfJem, Video by Thundertron
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Visiting Dragula Tour Outfit
September eighteenth Twenty Twenty five
Well well well. If it it isn't the outfit that started it all. If "it all" was this phase of my drag. I did originally do drag very briefly at high school events around two thousand fourteen through sixteen when I was a minor. If you want to be even more specific I basically did drag since childhood, I still have a photo of me in a Disney princess dress when I was a child because that's what I wanted to wear and do, be a woman obviously. As stated above, I found drag to be a political factor when I first started it, I grew up in a very conservative town and was called slurs and bulled pretty much daily to the point I was very suicidal. During this time theater, acting, and improv were the main objectives in my life and helped deeply with a lot of the emotional trauma I had. This is around the same time I figured "fuck it, if everyone hates me already I might as well do it doing what I love" so every chance I got I did drag, often nothing more than a wig and a dress with no makeup, I did drag for theater productions, school events, or whatever else reason I found like recording fake movies with friends. I knew I was gay and trans very early on in my life obviously from the child in a dress story, my gayness was easy for me to accept, my trans-ness however, in a very conservative town felt like a death curse bestowed upon me at birth. Speaking of death curses bestowed at birth, I have an immune system disease: Alopecia Areata. It's an immune system disease that targets hair when I get stressed, which as a gay child in the early two-thousands in a conservative town made me constantly ill with patches of hair missing from my head. This curse is also my blessing, because my trigger for this disease was stress I learned how to regulate my stress levels throughout time, not often times in healthy ways but it worked. When I realized I could semi regulate my stress I wanted to try stress inducing activities such as watching horror movies, or going to haunted houses, which I still love, as a kid I became a scare actor in some mazes in my home town. Anyways back to the point of this fucking outfit. My dad's side of the family is Armenian, my mom's is Welsh (and a number of other things). My Armenian side of me is not really something I would ever talk about but somehow always found me in my childhood, it always felt like the demon in a closet. A generational genocide that killed off my entire Dad's side of the family except for my father's grandfather. My great grandfather moved to Los Angeles from Armenia in 1917 (my dad still has the photo of his papers from Ellis Island), and changed his last name away from Donbalian. He began working at a tire store before moving to the central valley with many more Armenians. From there he had some kids and raised them to be terrified of what might happen if they were found out to be Armenian. So much of the history, culture, and language was lost. My grandfather passed down some cultural recipes and many of our holiday foods but that side of my life has felt like a hole. I grew up with Armenian friends, I grew up with the food, and I grew up with a label for who I was, Armenian. I wanted to ignore this label for years until I physically couldn't. That day came when I tried out my german partner's hair conditioner and shampoo. And let me tell you, that shit destroyed my hair. The hair dresser cut multiple fist size pieces of hair from my head because the hair was fused together. When I asked her what could have caused it, I listed the products and she told me directly, "you know that shampoo is for white people only right, this will destroy your hair". I guess getting hate crimed by a fucking shampoo bottle was a wake up call for me. After that day I had to really put my middle eastern identity into perspective, not just ignore it. One of the ways I've been helping myself with that is exploring Armenian culture, dishes, mythologies, symbolism, and language. When exploring the Armenia art medium the glowing recommendation everyone has is "The Color of Pomegranate" which Lady Gaga appropriated? Was Inspired by (is it inspired if you never credit that culture or film that you directly take 1 to 1 shots of)? for her 911 video. Anyways, the Color of Pomegranate uses a lot of the classic Armenian Taraz (cultural clothing that differs between the Armenian region) colors, as well as the general colors associated with Armenia: Red (Air, Pomegranates, and Blood), Black (Earth, Death, Mortals), and White (Water, Knowledge, and Spirituality). With many of the divine characters in the movie having a stark white face paint. That's where I took the white face paint from, the black clothing from the taraz main color, and red accents for the color of Armenia. This is reflected somewhat in my first look as myself. I made a headress and outfit that somewhat resembled a taraz but also was inspired by Italian Renaissance clowns (Italy is a place my Dad would always claim he was from when people asked). Overall, great attempt at a first go around, I wanted to originally be more clown like to bring in some of that Italian inspiration but after close consideration (I forgot to do it). I decided to refine to just being Armenian inspired. With some Victorian accents (I fucking love Victorian and Edwardian fashion in my personal life). Come on I'm AUDHD, of course my special loves slip into what I do. Overall: 6/10, Average, a good attempt with too many influences.
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Photos by Me
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