News from the Painting Front

Paintin' away here...

At this point - a week after The Lucky Chance build started, the set is about finished.  And about painted.

I'll be back at the theater at noon though to paint the laaaaaast bits - mainly some trim that was added yesterday evening after I had to stop painting for the day so paint could dry for rehearsal.

There seem to be two methods of scenic painting, or perhaps of scheduling scenic painting.  One way is to build scenery, usually in a scene shop, and to base and finish paint each piece on a paint floor with just touch-up in the theater.  The other way is to assemble the set in the theater space and then to paint the scenery "up."

Image from Wikkimedia Commons HERE © Jorge Royan / http://www.royan.com.ar / CC-BY-SA-3.0

There are advantages to painting scenery down on the floor.  For one thing, more paint methods are possible - like spattering - which needs to be horizontal to work.  You can be messier without worrying about spattering the velvet seats!  All your tools and materials are already there and convenient.  And it's possible to assembly-line the painting and thus speed it.

I love this photo, which shows just how detailed and controlled (yet huge!) scenic painting can be.

I'm having a hard time coming up with advantages to painting "up" and in the theater... except for the obvious one that, if no scene shop or paint floor is available, then painting in the theater is the only choice.

Usually, in order to ensure the set is finished in time, scenic painting at the theater has to start before carpentry is quite finished, building in a certain amount of inevitable delays, confusion, and re-dos.  But for The Lucky Chance - if I'd waited for the carpenters to be done before starting to paint - I'd be starting to paint TODAY.

The Lucky Chance opens in two days, on Friday.  Tickets HERE at Echo Theatre.

Come see!

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...

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.