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- Scenic painting takes time, and paint needs time to dry. Resign yourself to the fact that if you have any sort of detailed scenic painting, you won’t be finished by the end of put-in. If you go for a highly-textured look, you probably won’t be finished until the evening before opening night. Do any set pieces you can in advance. Co-ordinate with your TD and producer to see if you can get people to help you Monday – Thursday. Decide early on what level of ‘realistic’ painting you want (see “What Kind of Scenic Painting” above.)
- As you’re working, always step back to where the audience will be sitting and ask yourself if it looks right. If not, try something else, rinse, repeat.
- The audience are far away and the lights are bright, so even with 'realistic' painting, things need to be higher contrast and more exaggerated than they are in real life.
- Always check what the paint looks like with the stage lights as soon as you can, especially if you have a lot of bright washes. Give yourself time to correct paints based on the light.
- Bright, shiny things throw back light in the audiences faces. Avoid too much white, and avoid gloss altogether.
- If you don’t wash your brushes, they will glue together and have to be painstakingly scrubbed out with turpentine. You don’t want that, and neither do your lungs.
- When texturing, bear in mind where dirt, dust and wear actually collect in real life. Corners, seams and spaces between boards and bricks will always be grubbier than everywhere else. Moss grows in cracks. Rust grows around bolts. The bottom of walls will be more stained and scuffed than the top, and floors will be grubbier than walls.
- Teach people these techniques! The more people have them, the better.
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Fancy sponge (what like comes out of the ocean)
Wiki Markup
1. Put a small layer of paint in a flat paint tray and lightly dab the surface of the sponge into it (don’t get too much paint on the sponge, or else you will get a giant blob where you wanted artistic dappling).
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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.
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Fake
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[Cloth
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Trees
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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.
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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
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2.
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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
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