Right now my drafting board is piled high with backup material for doing taxes - but I wish it looked like this:
What I need is a show to design!
This is an old photo taken during the design and model making for Kitchen Dog's A Wolf at the Door. Below are a few construction photos:
The photo just above is from early in the build of the "rocky" landscape... involving A LOT of chicken wire and then more-or-less fabric mache'. For the landscape of the more recent Alabaster, the main criteria - according the the Kitchen Dogs building it - was that there be NO chicken wire! Hence the weathered plank retaining wall of the goat hill. Ha!
While we're talking landscape... I'll add in a sampling of other "environmental" sets.
I think the first secret to good "natural" landscapes is to avoid any straight edges and tablecloth-slopes that reveal its carpentry bones. Chicken wire or carved foam or any other method of creating softly broken and rounded edges are key.
The second secret is to observe nature and then do the best job you can to mimic the growth of plants, to randomize the placement of rocks (which should look half buried), and to include weeds, dead leaves, and all the little accidents of weathering or moss or litter that add reality.
For Ironbound at Kitchen Dog Theater success depended on recreating the genuine scruffy kicked-up gravel and dirt and weedy neglect of a bus stop:
For Enchanted April at WaterTower Theater, it was a matter of aging the architecture and then getting the wisteria and roses to twine naturally:
Sadly, in Spitfire Grill (it and all following shows were at WaterTower Theater) there is some definite "table-clothing"... but, being a more stylized show, the unashamed fakery, the blatant erosion cloth, and the real leaves managed to suggest Wisconsin woods anyway:
For The Sugarbean Sisters we needed jungley swamp. Giant reeds were mugged from a neglected property and supplemented with every church-social-hall-potted-fake-palm we could borrow:
Versus a tidier and more countryfied front yard for The Traveling Lady. (Just out of sight, I planted dozens of naturalized silk daffodils.) Notice how the nature gets more stylized as it goes upstage? Those trees are just painted cut outs. Frankly, they looked terrible until I placed a bird house on a pole right in front of them... turning the silhouettes into background. (The human eye and brain are weird.):
Here, for All My Sons, the sky gets stylized. But the lawn is as real as we could make it. (Okay... it got realer just after this photo was shot. Photographers always arrive a day too soon.):
For Native Gardens we used real gravel and live plants. (Though the argued over flowers had to become silk - because live ones died on us!)
Last example - Humble Boy, where the carpenter's really excellent stonework and the little level changes sold the whole illusion. That and those little errant spots of grass between the stones. (Copied from my sister's dollhouse. Really. Little teeny tiny fuzz between the flagstones.)
All photos courtesy of their respective theaters... except the bad ones, which are mine.
