...
4. If necessary, do a grey-dust dry brush
Floor painting
Sculling
Use for: Woodland/forest floors, grass
Required: Sponge brushes, long sticks/poles, two tones of green paint, lots of manual labour
This is a good effect for creating semi-realistic forest floors. It's called 'sculling' because it kind-of-sort-of involves the same motion as sculling in rowing or swimming: twisting the brush in little alternating semi-circles so you get paint marks that look a little like commas, and repeating different colours of them over each other until the whole floor is covered. It's best done with two shades of paint of the same kind of tone, so that it develops a texture. Use sponge brushes on the end of poles, one for each colour of paint – alternate brushes while the pain is still wet so you get some smudging between the colours.
This is a great task if you have a lot of labour to use during put-in - divide the group into two, give each group a paint colour, and make them try to out-skull each other. If you want to get really fancy you can designate a light green side, a dark green side and a war zone in the middle, to create a nice gradient effect across the stage.
Sculled floor in Midsummer Night's Dream, 2008 (set design by B. Conrad and G. Kane)
Flagstones:
1. Mark out a grid with a chalk line, or just use the handy edges of the masonite that are already there
2. Paint the central line with a dark brown or grey
3. Dry brush around it or smudge it out with a little water
4. Speckle/wash/otherwise distress the floor as usual
Flagstones in Romeo & Juliet, 2011 (set design by G. Kane). Also demonstrates floor-speckling, below.
Speckling
This is the most enjoyable of scenic painting activities, can be given to anyone, and makes your floor look awesome. Blank floors can sometimes look good on very minimalist sets, especially if they are black. But any sort of light colour will look like an awful washed-out block under stage lighting. It will also look a LOT lighter than you think it will.
So for the purposes of not blinding our audiences with 4000 square feet of surprisingly reflective mid-grey, it’s good to add texture to floors. We could do this with stippling if we wanted to permanently cripple ourselves, so we don’t.
Instead:
1. Get a bunch of thick glazes in various brown/greyish tones. These should be thin enough to be slightly translucent but still show a noticeable colour.
2. Get a bunch of people and a bunch of paintbrushes. Have them dip their brush in a glaze, and walk around the set flicking it onto the floor to create lots of little speckles. Repeat until adequately speckled. Enjoy saying the word ‘speckle’.
Technique tip: As much as your assistants might want try, you don’t want the glaze to hit the floor in streaks, you want it to hit the ground like little raindrops. The best way to do this is not to fling your brush in a swashbuckling manner (as is the tendency of beginners), but to hold it parallel with the ground and do a little flick, wingardium leviosa-style. You’ll figure out pretty quickly what works and what looks like Jackson Pollock.
Fake [Cloth] Trees
You can create a knarled-bark effect like the surface of an old tree with cloth and glue.
N.B. This is a messy and unpleasant experience.
N.B. You’re probably asking, well, why don’t we just do paper mache? The answer is that you don’t have enough time to make it look like anything better than a 5th-grade school play. The fabric also gives you a better wood texture, as it turns out.
1. The difficult way
Take a large sheet of cloth, and place it onto the surface you’re trying to make into knarled wood.
Bunch up and staple to the surface strategically so you can create wrinkles that look like bark wrinkles in trees.
Paint the entire thing with PVC glue
Leave to try, paint and texture
2. The [slightly] easier [but still gruesome] way
Roll tubes of fabric or newspaper and soak them in glue
Apply them to the surface along the lines where you want the knarled wood whorls to go, and leave to dry
Cut long strips of fabric, about 2-3’’ thick.
Soak them in glue
Apply them over the top of the fabric/paper tubes, smoothing the ends down to mask the seams in the fabric.
Leave to dry, paint and texture
N.B. PVC glue takes a very long time to dry indeed. Bear this is mind – you might even want to thin it out with water a little to help it dry quicker. Employ the paper-mache technique you learned when you were three of running the strips through your fingers to get the excess glue off before you apply them.
Fake Concrete (Rough Walls)
Concrete has an interesting texture in the sense that, while every piece of concrete looks different, it's easily recognizable that it's concrete. And relatively easy to paint! Just:
- Take a paint tray, put a generous amount of (dark but not anywhere near black) gray paint
- Add a pretty nice glob of white paint in the middle of the tray. Less is more!
- Take a rough roller (one that's been nicely loved), roll it in the tray so that the outside of the roller is soaked in gray and middle in white
- Paint your walls
- While still wet, go over the walls with a roller and minimal gray (like dry brushing but with rollers, fuzes the white together while keeping the rough concrete texture)
- Stand 20 ft away and see if the white is random enough. If not, the wiki recommends you take more grey to certain areas and not others.
Rough Concrete Walls from Hamlet, 2017 (set design by Jakob Weisblat and Maya Levy)
Fake Concrete (Molded Walls)
Molded concrete (the kind you'll see on the ceilings of Simmons dorm rooms) looks like wood but also concrete at the same time. It's annoying to describe (or paint). The wiki recommends painting a base of gray and half-heartingly (light pressure) streaking with whites and minimal black.
Molded Concrete Walls from Hamlet, 2017 (set design by Jakob Weisblat and Maya Levy)
Floor painting
Sculling
Use for: Woodland/forest floors, grass
Required: Sponge brushes, long sticks/poles, two tones of green paint, lots of manual labour
This is a good effect for creating semi-realistic forest floors. It's called 'sculling' because it kind-of-sort-of involves the same motion as sculling in rowing or swimming: twisting the brush in little alternating semi-circles so you get paint marks that look a little like commas, and repeating different colours of them over each other until the whole floor is covered. It's best done with two shades of paint of the same kind of tone, so that it develops a texture. Use sponge brushes on the end of poles, one for each colour of paint – alternate brushes while the pain is still wet so you get some smudging between the colours.
This is a great task if you have a lot of labour to use during put-in - divide the group into two, give each group a paint colour, and make them try to out-skull each other. If you want to get really fancy you can designate a light green side, a dark green side and a war zone in the middle, to create a nice gradient effect across the stage.
Sculled floor in Midsummer Night's Dream, 2008 (set design by B. Conrad and G. Kane)
Flagstones:
1. Mark out a grid with a chalk line, or just use the handy edges of the masonite that are already there
2. Paint the central line with a dark brown or grey
3. Dry brush around it or smudge it out with a little water
4. Speckle/wash/otherwise distress the floor as usual
Flagstones in Romeo & Juliet, 2011 (set design by G. Kane). Also demonstrates floor-speckling, below.
Speckling
This is the most enjoyable of scenic painting activities, can be given to anyone, and makes your floor look awesome. Blank floors can sometimes look good on very minimalist sets, especially if they are black. But any sort of light colour will look like an awful washed-out block under stage lighting. It will also look a LOT lighter than you think it will.
So for the purposes of not blinding our audiences with 4000 square feet of surprisingly reflective mid-grey, it’s good to add texture to floors. We could do this with stippling if we wanted to permanently cripple ourselves, so we don’t.
Instead:
1. Get a bunch of thick glazes in various brown/greyish tones. These should be thin enough to be slightly translucent but still show a noticeable colour.
2. Get a bunch of people and a bunch of paintbrushes. Have them dip their brush in a glaze, and walk around the set flicking it onto the floor to create lots of little speckles. Repeat until adequately speckled. Enjoy saying the word ‘speckle’.
Technique tip: As much as your assistants might want try, you don’t want the glaze to hit the floor in streaks, you want it to hit the ground like little raindrops. The best way to do this is not to fling your brush in a swashbuckling manner (as is the tendency of beginners), but to hold it parallel with the ground and do a little flick, wingardium leviosa-style. You’ll figure out pretty quickly what works and what looks like Jackson Pollock.
Fake [Cloth] Trees
You can create a knarled-bark effect like the surface of an old tree with cloth and glue.
N.B. This is a messy and unpleasant experience.
N.B. You’re probably asking, well, why don’t we just do paper mache? The answer is that you don’t have enough time to make it look like anything better than a 5th-grade school play. The fabric also gives you a better wood texture, as it turns out.
1. The difficult way
Take a large sheet of cloth, and place it onto the surface you’re trying to make into knarled wood.
Bunch up and staple to the surface strategically so you can create wrinkles that look like bark wrinkles in trees.
Paint the entire thing with PVC glue
Leave to try, paint and texture
2. The [slightly] easier [but still gruesome] way
Roll tubes of fabric or newspaper and soak them in glue
Apply them to the surface along the lines where you want the knarled wood whorls to go, and leave to dry
Cut long strips of fabric, about 2-3’’ thick.
Soak them in glue
Apply them over the top of the fabric/paper tubes, smoothing the ends down to mask the seams in the fabric.
Leave to dry, paint and texture
N.B. PVC glue takes a very long time to dry indeed. Bear this is mind – you might even want to thin it out with water a little to help it dry quicker. Employ the paper-mache technique you learned when you were three of running the strips through your fingers to get the excess glue off before you apply them.
Wood effects in Midsummer Night's Dream, 2008 (set design by B. Conrad and G. Kane)
Painting Your Friends:
There comes a time in a scenic painter's life where they have to actually use some semblence of artistic talent, maybe in this case to paint an actual realistic portrait/intricate landscape. Because you are likly an MIT student who probably does not have enough time for any of that, the wiki recommends printing a picture of the painting (if portrait of actor, use publicity photos + coordinate with costume persons) with the large printer in the ensemble office, use white masking tape or white gauff on the back sides to reinforce corners, and painting over the portrait. If faces are too hard, the wiki recommends painting everything but the face. No one will be able to tell from 20 feet away except the wrinkling on the paper and slight glaze will make it look slightly like a painting.
Wood effects in Midsummer Night's Dream, 2008 (set design by B. Conrad and G. Kane)