Scenic Painting - Backdrops

The traditional painted backdrop doesn't happen much when I set design... In part because I  just don't design for many proscenium theaters, but mostly because I don't lean toward the picture-postcard-backdrop school of thought - for me, sets are more environment than picture.

But Trinity Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale seemed to demand a backdrop.

Besides, for once, I had a real, bonafide, not-me! talented scenic painter on board.

So here's the process:

Schematic design sketch for Trinity Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale

Yellow tracing paper, ink, and colored pencil

First came the rough sketch, showing the theater seating (thrust, with seats and balconies around three sides).  This was mainly to explain to the director what I was proposing.  The idea was to create a "tapestry" appropriate to the court scenes with which the play begins (and that reappear in Act II), but one that would also fit as the environment for the outdoor scenes.  A bleak winter woods.  Prowled by bears.

Design development sketch for Trinity Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale

Yellow tracing paper, ink, watercolor pencil, colored pencil, and CAD

Here's the next sketch, just the backdrop itself because the frame is in another downstage plane.  The center part of the view will also be in another plane, back about a foot from the rest, and attached to a huge sliding door that opens for the final "statue" scene.

Color rendering for Trinity Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale 

Vellum, watercolor, watercolor pencil, and some colored pencil

I struggled with this.

Above is the final rendering that the scenic painters would work from.

 Progress photos of the backdrop for Trinity Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale

Here are progress photos.  Unfortunately, the backdrop was too tall to fit on the scene shop's painting frame.  (This is a sort of elevator-easel that moves up and down so the painter doesn't need ladders.  Very cool!  I desperately wanted to see it in action... but it's only 20' tall.  This drop was 28'.)  So it was painted in the Opera Dept.'s rehearsal hall.  (Thanks Opera!)

Progress photo of Trinity Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale

onstage scenic painting - backdrop, frame, and floor.  Notice how that tree stump has developed!

Then the not-quite-finished drop was transferred to the theater.  You can see how the center section has been cut out at that sliding door.  We tried to attached that portion of the view - painted on muslin -  TO the door, but in the end it had to be painted ON the door itself.  Notice the progress of the painted "stone" floor.

The Winter's Tale, at Leontes' court

Photo by Amy Peterson, courtesy of Trinity Shakespeare Festival

Here is the backdrop in backdrop/tapestry mode for Leontes' court.

The Winter's Tale, at Leontes' court

Photo by Amy Peterson, courtesy of Trinity Shakespeare Festival

And in the "chapel" scene.  Note the gorgeous floor.

The Winter's Tale

Photo by Amy Peterson, courtesy of Trinity Shakespeare Festival

Stage daylight lets you see the beautifully painted stump and other details.  Like, below, the distant view of a fortified city.

The Winter's Tale

Photo by Amy Peterson, courtesy of Trinity Shakespeare Festival

A big shout-out to scenic painter Kaitlyn Donovan and her assistants!  Thanks.  Gratitude also for the beautifully detailed build.  (There was some coolo laser cutting technology involved in those oval corner plaques on the frame.)  Props worked hard on great faux wool bales for the final "shepherd" scenes.

Trinity Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale

The shepherds throw a party... complete with wool bales and piano.

Photo by Amy Peterson

And thanks for the lovely lighting!  Nice costumes too, huh?  This was just a beautiful show and an accomplished one all round, I thought.  Directing, acting, dance, song...  Critics seemed to agree - always nice.

Back to the drawing board... a little battered and coffee stained.

Oh, remember that rendering?  Here it is back home to my studio... having clearly worked for its living at the scene shop.  

Lessons learned?  (There are always lessons to learn.)

1)  Get better and faster at watercolor.  So I'm now taking a watercolor class.

2)  I really like this pro-scenic painter thing - get more of 'em! more often!

3)  Encase the rendering in plastic next time.

Short Builds

When you can only have (read "rent") the theater venue for a limited time, it often happens that the set will still be being built as the painting progresses and the lighting hang and focus happen. Furniture, props and even costumes will cross the (wet, yet saw-dusty) set on their way to the dressing rooms.

Chaos!

Organized chaos.

All you can do is try to stay good-humored and helpful through this time. Try to accommodate your fellow toilers as you finish your own work.

In my case, it's a matter of keeping the messy paints etc. as grouped together out of the way as possible. I try to work where the others don't - that instant - need to be and to warn them of where the paint is wet.

It can be a little discouraging. You feel you're making progress painting across the set... then discover new, unpainted trim behind you. Or you turn to dip your brush in the can of blue-green paint just as the lights dip - and suddenly you can't tell the blue-green from the green-blue paint next to it.  (I advise setting out paints, then memorizing their placement. But I forgot.) Fancy brushwork tends to suffer when lighting changes frequently or when the painter, carpenter, and master electrician all need to work in the same four square feet of floor space!

Keep your sense of humor.

Tweaky, Tweaky

With set builds there are only two ways to time completion:

1 Too Late - You worry that it will, in fact, be finished.  The set designer and builder suffer ulcers and/or sleep deprivation as the deadline approaches.  Somehow though, the set is nearly always done for Opening ("How?  I don't know, it's a mystery").  The audience smells wet paint.

OR

2 Too Early - This means that you did in fact get 98% of your design built onstage looking 98% like you, the designer, hoped... but this gives everyone else in the production time to stare at the set and suggest tweaks.  The audience smells wet paint.

Tonight is the opening for The Beauty Queen of Leenane.  Great show - come out and see!

(And what do you think you may smell?)

sketch by Clare Floyd DeVries - copyrighted, for once

This n' That

A This n' That sort of set designer's day:

Coffee with a colleague, talkin' set design - his, mine, every show we've seen lately's, and the scenery for the Andrew Lloyd Weber sequel Love Never Dies on DVD.  Lots of fun.  Plus a demonstration of the very cool Bamboo drawing tablet.  I think I know now what I want for Christmas.  (Okay, and for birthday and Presidents' Day and...)

After that, I stickem-ed the last of the tacky (in every possible sense!) floor tiles to the stage for The Beauty Queen of Leenane.  Other brave and sticky volunteers started the job Sunday - until we ran out of tiles.  We're protecting the actual stage floor with an intervening layer of tar paper, stapled down, in hopes of easy removal.  But the sticking down is the stickiest thing you can imagine!  Sticky hands, sticky hair, sticky to the paper backing, sticky to the floor, to everything!  Wash-up includes slathering hands with WD40, then lots of soap and water.  Repeat.  Maybe a couple times.

Sketch by Clare Floyd DeVries, copyright, right?

This sketch was made during the designers' run the other night.  

I've started sketching during runs like this; it took me a while to figure out why exactly.  I think it's partly to document progress and partly a sort of shyness.  In the brightly lit theater under house lights and in the sparse audience of a designers' run (4-5 people!) it lets me feel less on-display myself and gives me a little distance from the show (like adjusting the volume).  Because a play can be too powerful for comfort sometimes, undiluted by the rest of the audience and unprotected by the darkness of the auditorium.  

At least for me.  

But then, I never sit in the front row for a show either, for similar reasons.

The Beauty Queen of Leenane - even under house lights - is a powerful play.

You can see my earlier sketch of what this set will (I hope) eventually look like HERE and the latest progress photo (and the tacky tile!) right here:

The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Kitchen Dog Theater, week 2 progress - photo by Mike Wang

Progress Pic

Here's the set for The Beauty Queen of Leenane as of 4:30 yesterday.  I'm off in a few minutes for today's stint, after a morning of printing out Irish grocery store-brand canned goods.

(I know, I know, but just wait till it's finished: the magic is yet to come.)

Photo courtesy of Mike Wang 

Back to the Land of the Living...

Or the breathing world anyway...

 I've just FINALLY finished paper mache'ing a huge 3D rainbow construction in the garage for the Big local theater's summer kid program.  So... I get to breath again.  I've been incredibly busy and battered by many deadlines (the shows Ruth, Boeing Boeing, and now Mistakes Were Made have Teched) and I really feel like I haven't taken a break in weeks.  


This morning is my first deeeeep breath.


Phew!


But it will take time to soak the gluey colored paper off my hands.  I kind of love big messy projects (gluey feet included).   I've been sitting in my garage every morning for the last two weeks - when the day is still cool - gluing rainbow colored paper to a big geometric "rainbow" construction and feeling like I was enacting a living garage-tableau for my neighbors of Paper Craft, The Endless Installation.  


Finally done!

Copyright Clare Floyd DeVries and Clint Ray

Painting Slats...

And slats and more slats...

My Ruth set is going to have a built-out-of-pallets look, so here we all are painting the slats for the pallets.  (The blue box is the side of the theater building.  I'm the one bending over so elegantly, fiddling with a paintbrush-onna-stick.  Co-Artistic Director Tina Parker is the only one facing the camera - wearing her "Boss Hogg" Tshirt - and wonderful, wonderful volunteers are behind us, painting.  Thank you, volunteers!)

Later in the day, as the shade disappeared, this got to be a very hot job indeed.

Building Ruth at Kitchen Dog Theater - photo by Tim Johnson

A Grab Bag

Lots of little notes today:

On my desk is a lovely old copy of Architecture, Gothic and Renaissance by Roger Smith.  My copy is old (found at Half Price Books for a whopping $5, love that place), with a hand written note of "1952" in it.  But after checking online, it looks like the book was actually copyrighted in 1908... which explains the lovely illustrations.  Public domain!  Wahoo!  No doubt you'll be seeing images from it in future posts too.

The Grand Canal, illus. from Architecture, Gothic and Renaissance by Roger Smith - public domain

Also in books, I'm presently reading, well, several things.  Among them the very funny and eye-opening history of the American '5os as a memoir by Bill Bryson, The Thunderbolt Kid.  Also a revisionist history of interior design since 1600 (whose title I can't recall this second), more on that later.

On the Film Fest front: I recently watched Cedar Rapids.  I was only accidentally watching it at first - it was on in the room - but I was soon caught up in the adventure and misadventures of the hero, a naive small-town-Iowa insurance salesman on his first visit to his industry convention in the wicked city of Cedar Rapids.

Epic!  The guy's an Odysseus on stormy seas indeed - harrowed to his soul by the temptations of this larger pond.  A fascinating and very funny movie.

Also movie related: Aardman Animations new film The Pirates! is open and I want to see it badly.  These guys are brilliant... Wallace and Grommet?  Chicken Run?  Brilliance in stop motion Claymation.

On the set design frontier: I'm scrambling to keep up with several projects.

Boeing, Boeing is being built.  Its flats (walls) are largely built, leaning around the shop ready to get installed, as the main stage level is built, using the stock steel joists WaterTower Theater has on hand.  On top of that will go a few steps and a slightly raised rear "hallway" with a French "wrought iron" railing.  I got to take a field trip to a shop where the decorative curly-cue part of the railing is waiting - not actually bent metal, but cut from plate steel by very high power and focused water jets.  Fascinating machinery.

Meanwhile, in Fort Worth, Mistakes Were Made is also being built.  This show will have a puppet fish in it, so the real complications of this simple set are all around how to build this fish tank area to make the fish visible, yet the puppeteer screened.  Tricky.

At Kitchen Dog, Ruth is getting close to building.  The carpenter is considering the drawings - which have been revised a bit as rehearsals, the script, and the director have evolved the work.  Working with a live playwright and developing text is always interesting.  (Earlier post on living playwrights HERE.)

And, of course, there are a couple shows on the drawing board.

Phew!

Sign How-To

One scene in the play Collapse, by Allison Moore, is set to the blinking light of a Minneapolis landmark: the Gold Medal Flour sign.  My set design for this show now includes several other signs inspired by local landmarks.

But how to build them?

The coffee shop sign was the simplest to build - a wooden board with a painted coffee-cup-n-spoon reminiscent, though not matching, one local spot and many other signs around the country from that era.  Easy: cut a board, trim it, base paint it, render a cup-n-spoon, letter it etc., then figure out how to hang it.

The sign with wavy "river" lines (inspired by a landmark property) was almost as easy.  Another board - almost 6' long - with painted lines and lettering.  This was harder though, because at almost 6' long it's difficult to keep lettering straight and keep waves from... going crazy.  So all this had to be drafted; then those drawings peeled off my board; the rear of the drawing blackened with graphite; then flip it, place it, and trace it onto the board.  Paint with a steady hand.  Last step - drill holes, attach clips, and install blue rope light so "waves" will light up.  The volunteers doing that work did a terrific job.

Looks cool!

The "FLOUR" sign?  I anticipated a horrible time cutting out letters, but got lucky.  The automated cutters used in frame shops to cut picture mats can cut letters too!  Letters turned out to be the easy part.  But then letters needed 1" diameter holes cut in them (with a drill bit) so light bulbs can be installed.  A metal-strut frame needed to be built.  Letters had to be mounted on the frame.  Then lights installed.  Later this week, I'll be figuring out how to make the raised rims or edge bands around the letters...

The audience will see cool, local-ambiance signs, but will have no idea how much work went into them.

Believed public domain images

Second Weekend of Collapse build

Everyone pitches in and helps.

Help!  Time to pack up these (almost) dry signs and go.

believed public domain photo.

Urgent Messages

As the build of a set nears the crunch time of Load-In, the frequency and urgency of phone calls increases.  If for some reason you, the Designer, must be out of touch, for instance at a holiday party, a movie, a death-bed...  on your return you will find half a dozen urgent messages awaiting instant decision!

It's like mothering a toddler: take a fast little personal trip away and you may hear a desperate creature pounding on the bathroom door, sobbing, until you rejoin them.

Image borrowed from We Too Were Children - modified

If copyright holder (if any) wishes removal, gladly! Just ask.

This mommy-don't-leave! problem gets worse in film.  I once prepared the set for shooting, then told the crew and AD that I absolutely had to get something at Home Depot and that I would absolutely be back in thirty minutes.   Ten minutes later, when I was deep into the plumbing aisle, I got a frantic call because a) shooting had moved and now, instead of the prepped set, they wanted to shoot another area entirely and b) in that other area... how - please God! how?! - should the hand towel be folded?!!!

I kid you not.

But if this sounds like these calls are unwelcome - far from it.  Calls are much more welcome than what happens when no one calls!

Set Designer's Weekend

My several shows are moving along:

Yesterday I visited the scene shop where Frequency of Death is building.  It's all base painted now in shades of gray.  Painting the floor was the next thing on the list, along with mounting all the dials, switches, and vents I'd found and bought and brought with me.  I spent a fun few minutes arranging them on a tabletop - like pictures on a wall.  Then the TD (Technical Director) took a phone-pic of them, so he could match that arrangement on the actual face of the faux equipment.  (The floor was wet, so we couldn't get at that wall to do this in place.)

Typical scene shop chop saw - photo donated to public domain

Meanwhile, my The Diary of Anne Frank is also building.  I went to that scene shop to look at painted doors and to discuss the caps that need to be added to the chimney.  And to borrow a couple black chairs for Frequency.

Today there's a Designers' Run of Anne Frank.  Heating up...

Frequency Build

A few photos from the Frequency of Death scene shop:

Overview of the scene shop

"On stage" view of the set

Close-up of the Sound Booth

Almost built!  Painters will start black & whiting it shortly.

Shop Visit: or Our Industrial Legacy

Last night I got to check progress on my B&W The Frequency of Death set.

It looks great!  The faux hotel ballroom is built - walls but not details.  The faux control booth is, as yet, only a chalk line on the raised platform.  Stairs are half done.  Everything looks very neatly and substantially built.

Now we just need paint applied...

Pegasus is borrowing another theater's scene shop, so I got to explore a new workshop: a former auto manufacturing plant now used as cheap studio or shop space.  My set shares a lofty room with rows of kitchen cabinets left by a former tenant and with glorious mosaics of angels of gold-tile wings, designed perhaps in the '60s, now being restored.

It's fascinating to find the tucked-away places where Things Get Done, the garages, old warehouses, and other forgotten spaces where wondrous things are created.

One theater had a huge metal barn of a shed as their shop - in a scary part of town.  I always felt I was exploring there...  Fantastic pieces of children's shows hung from metal rafters; mildewy chairs crowded shelves; Narnian lampposts jostled Wonderlandian mushrooms in back corners; and feral cats slunk in and out of a rip in the metal ceiling.  (So did rain.)  Many scene shops hide in old industrial areas.  If the TV production is big enough, it takes over the whole complex, but you'll seldom see a sign.  Why advertise?  It's an invitation to get tools stolen - or expensive cameras.

Believed public domain photo borrowed from Sunday Rearview Mirror

One theater shop hides behind a Bingo parlor.  One hid behind a wedding chapel.  Many theaters are tucked away in garages (including, once, mine), more for the cheap (free) rent than for the anonymity.

One theater group built outdoors on a deck - hellaciously hot in summer -  and had to bucket-brigade water from a paint sink downstairs.  Which was shared as a laundry sink.  (There's a disaster waiting to happen!)  Every shop has a floor stained and spattered with the paint of a thousand shows and a sink painted the weird gray-beige gungey no-color of a hundred thousand splashes.  (Look!  Blue paint on my driveway.)

Besides paint spatter, the other thing scene shops have in common is that tucked-away quality that comes with low rent: a blank or even disreputable exterior, hiding a beehive of creative activity.

Volunteers!

Bless 'em, I say.  Theater couldn't happen without 'em.

Work continues on the set for In the Other Room: the Vibrator Play.  The bulk of that labor comes from committed Kitchen Dogs who, though they may or may not be an official part of this show, turn up to help out.  The rest of the slogging comes courtesy of just flat-out volunteers, who from friendship or love of theater or some crazy-altruistic urge show up and get dirty and Get Things Done.  One of our volunteers helps, seems like, every theater in town.  Wonderful people.

Thank you!

I'd like to re-institute the Order of Merit I first created for that (killer!) build for Edward Albee's play The Goat and hereby bestow it upon You, the loyal, untiring builders of this show: