What does the scenic painter do?
Depending on the nature of the set, this could either be a small side-job done by the Set Designer, or an in-depth prod position all on its own. However large a role it is, being the scenic painter generally involves designing and planning the painting of the set (inc. a painting schedule), painting the set yourself and/or directing others in the proper techniques of set painting.
Set designers: It would be beneficial for set designers to read this over to see what's involved in painting a set, whether they need a Scenic Painter to help them, and whether the effects they are trying to create are possible within time and budget.
Common misconception: A scenic painter has to be "artsy". Not so. Do you know what dirt looks like? Good. Can you trace someone else's drawing projected onto a wall? Awesome, you are a-ok for 90% of scenic painting tasks. That said - plan to your talent base. If you need to do lots of intricate wood grain or cornicing patterns or suchlike, you might want to find someone who can draw for at least those parts.
Choosing a Type of Scenic Painting
Scenic painting loosely falls into two categories: textured & non-textured.
Textured is when surfaces on your stage are meant to look like real surfaces - the texture of wood, stone, etc has to be recreated.
Non-textured is when the painting is more abstract - either representing real things in a simplified or cartoonish way, or completely abstract altogether.
A set can be abstract (i.e. doesn’t look like a real place) and still involve textures. For example, this giant map-on-a-floor was textured to look stone-like.
King Lear, 2010 (set by B. Conrad)
A set can also represent a place: with furniture, rooms etc, and be very minimalist in its painting.
Les Mains Sales, 2008 (set by K. Cameron)
In general, textured painting takes a lot longer than non-textured painting (you could be painting a giant, complicated, non-textured mural, but this tends to be rare). An important thing to remember is DON’T GO HALFWAY. Sets that are made to look ‘kind of real’ invariably look terrible.
Co-ordinate with your set designer and talk about what kind of effects they want. If they wants a super-realistic looking set, make sure that you have a plan for how you can create all the textures and colours involved. If not, see if you can go with something more clean and symbolic looking.
Also, co-ordinate with the costume designer! Not many scenic designers think about this, but it's important that a) the colors don't clash b) the styles of the costumes and scene don't look odd together. Very intricate costumes work best against either completely plain sets or equally detailed texturing. However, they tend to look odd against very stylized or cartoonish non-textured painting. At the same time, if your actors are all wearing blacks and your scenic painting is very detailed, the audience will wonder what the technicians are doing on stage. Make sure these things work together!
General Scenic Painting Rules
- 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.
Scenic Painting Toolkit: What you’ll need before put-in
Emulsion paint: Your main floor/flat basecoat, plus some other commonly-occurring colours in your set. It’s always good to have some stock white and black emulsion cans around for mixing.
Box of acrylic paints: Good for detail and texture work/providing specific tints to emulsion paints. Many and varied but particularly orange (rust), green (moss), various colours of brown (dirt).
Rollers & sticks: The kind one uses to paint walls in real life. Ideally get a lot of these (>4) so that you can get lots of people doing mass jobs like painting the stage/flats basecoat all at once during put-in.
Paint trays: Often come with the rollers. Big flat plastic trays for pouring paint in.
Paint brushes: Thick wall-painting brushes (>3’’), thin wall-painting brushes (>1’’), detail paintbrushes and sponge brushes.
Artistic sponges: The kind that once lived in the sea. Expensive, but time-saving. Can be almost-faked by ripping apart a large bath sponge.
Dish sponges: Cheap things used for washing dishes. Buy as many as you want!
Painter’s tape/masking tape: Absolutely essential for almost all scenic painting – specifically designed to stop you painting outside the lines.
Newspaper: To mop up wastes, and protect that precious Sala floor. I am not telling you to steal lots of copies of The Tech right now, nope.
Chalk and/or chalk-line: particularly important if you’re painting large mural-type shapes onto the set
Projector: Only if you need to paint a large mural onto part of the set
Turpentine/non-toxic paint thinner: For life’s little emergencies such as paint-dried-into-brush, paint-on-Sala-floor and paint-on-costume.
Cheesecloth: Only if you have a lot of old wood, or vegetation.
Sand & Sawdust: For texture paint. Collect it when cutting wood to build the set.
Mixing buckets (or old paint cans): for mixing glazes
Painting Techniques
Painting Large Murals on Walls/Floors
Henry V, 2007 (set design by K. Cameron)
Using Projectors
1. Make a slide/image file of the outline of the image you want to put onto the wall. You only need the basic outline, as you're trying to get everything in proportion - you can fill in the details later.
2. Project said image onto wall.
3. With chalk, marker or light paint, copy the image onto said wall
4. Turn off projector, fill in details of image
Using a grid system
This is more useful for large images that need to be painted on a floor.
1. Get a copy of the image you want, and superimpose a grid over it. 4 x 4 usually works alright, but you can up the number of squares depending on the size of the area the image is to be painted on.
2. Copy this same grid onto the floor using chalk line.
3. Copy the rough outline of the shape onto the floor with chalk, using the grid as a guide. Sticking chalk on the end of a pole so you can draw standing up works well to keep you at enough distance to see whether the overall shape is correct or not.
Grid mapping in theater class. Not an actual set, sadly.
Stippling
Stippling can be done in many ways. In all cases:
Step 1: Choose a base coat colour. You should choose this to be a) cheap, because you’ll be using lots of it and b) approximately in the middle of the colour range for of the surface you’re trying to imitate, as you’re going to be doing both light and dark stippling over it. For this reason, mid-greys mixed from stock black-and-white paint from the Office work very well for stone.
Step 2: Paint the base coat, leave to dry.
Step 3: Choose your stippling colours. Start with one a little lighter and one a little darker than your base coat. After you do the first few stipple coats, you can start making it up as you go along – introducing different tones, going lighter/etc.
Step 4: Lightly stipple the whole surface with the first two stipple coats. As will be emphasized many times to you later, don’t pick up too much paint, apply *lightly, and blot first if you’re not sure.*
Step 5: Add texture/shape/shadow.
If you’re doing natural stone, pick some different tones (a little bit of brown, greens or even blues mixed in with the base coat work well) and stipple them in patches over the surface. You’re trying to create a natural uneven-ness, so the surface shouldn’t be visible divided into Brownish Areas and Greenish Areas, but some bits should be a little browner/a little greener than others.
If you’re doing foliage/jungle, you might want to start stippling in separate bushes/shrubs/bits of trees by stippling shrub-shaped patches in different colours.
Shading: If you’re doing brickwork, start with the natural stone approach then get a much darker (NOT black) colour and carefully stipple around the areas between the bricks to create emphasis. This can also be done to emphasise cracks or lumps in natural stone, or to make forest bushes look a bit more 3-D.
Step 6: Add any other texture effects (dry-brushing, glazing, etc – to be described later)
Step 7: Finally, add stippled “features”: basically anything stippled that is meant to actually represent something more than a texture – e.g. moss, rust, lichen, dirt stains, dried blood...
These sometimes need several texture colors themselves, depending on the area they cover, but often simple orange (for rust) or green (for moss) stippling will do. 
Heavily stippled wall from Twelfth Night, 2008 (set design D. Habib)
Stippling Methods
Fancy sponge (what like comes out of the ocean)
These you can get at yer standard art shop (try A&C, central), but are pretty expensive and should not be trusted to [the] uncaring hands [of actors]. They are, however, the best for stippling because they already come with a lumpy surface – cheap kitchen sponges have flat surfaces, and so need some violent abuse before they can be properly used to stipple. Art sponges are also a zillion times quicker than paintbrush stippling. They are best used for the first “base stipple coats” (step 4 as described above) and overall texture, as they create wide, spaced out dots and cover a large area. Depending on the size of your surface, they might be too big and wide-spaced to do detailed texture, features or shading.
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).
2. Keep a newspaper around to blot excess paint onto before you apply it to the surface. It’s a very good idea to blot every time when you start off..
3. LIGHTLY apply the sponge to the surface. Try not to squish or put any pressure on it at all, as this will result in instant blobbiness.
4. As you get the hang of the sponge, you can try some deliberate artistic blobbiness – useful, for instance, if you’re creating shrubs or areas of trees and need quite a lot of space filled in with colour. But for texture, remember that too much paint is not your friend.
N.B. If you are cheap, you can sometimes fake an art sponge by ripping apart a large synthetic bath sponge.
Cheap synthetic sponge (like what comes out of your sink)
You know them – the little square green ones with a scrubbing pad on the side. Though these suck at stippling compared to their Parazoatic counterparts, they are an essential scenic painting tool as they can also be used for dry-brushing, glazing and (if you’re quick enough) wiping away mistakes. Buy lots from the dollar store before you start put-in.
Since these are smaller and create dots that are more tightly packed than art sponges, they are good for shading, features and more detailed textures. They need *very* light amounts of paint, otherwise they will print square blocks. Test the sponge on a piece of paper beforehand – if it looks too blocky, rip it apart with your bare hands (don’t cut it) and use the ripped surface instead. If necessary, fold it in half and stipple with the fold to get rid of those pesky corners.
Stippling with a paintbrush
Good for detail work and beloved of the perfectionist and masochistic scenic painter. Put a little bit of paint on the end of the brush, hold it exactly perpendicular to the surface, and pretend you’re Georges Seraut (i.e. make lots of little dots). More paint on the brush will give you big, solid dots, less paint will give you light, speckled dots that look almost like dry-brushing. It really depends on what effect you’re going for. If you’re creating rust, lichen or moss, start with big, close-together dots in the middle of the rust patch, and then use thinner dots around the edges so there isn’t a clear line between the feature and the base texture. Same goes for shading the space in between bricks – big dots to emphasize the actual lines, thinner dots to create more subtle shading.
This is an excellent technique for features (moss, lichen, rust, etc etc) and detailed shading. It can also be used for large base textures, but this will take ages and drive you insane.
Dry-Brushing
This technique, as the name implies, involves texturing with a brush so devoid of paint that it’s almost dry – or rather, the layer of paint on the brush is so thin that it is dry immediately after being applied to the surface.
This creates a far more subtle texture effect than stippling, is often used as the next layer up. Stippling on its own (especially for stonework) can look a bit obvious and high-school: adding dry-brushing can give flat surfaces another layer of texture and griminess. It’s good for shading, and also for dulling out colors that are too vibrant – a good light-grey dry brush over a surface can give it a nice dusty, aged look. Dry-brushing onto shiny metallic surfaces is a good way of dulling them down and making them look aged (as well as not bouncing the light).
Step 1: Use a wide (at least 1-2’’) painter’s brush, and dip the *very tips of it* lightly in paint.
Step 2: Drag it lightly along the surface – the paint should be dry immediately as it touches
Step 3: Do a few more strokes until the brush runs out of paint, then very lightly reapply paint.
Use long strokes for linear surfaces (like wood boards or streaked rock), and smaller, twisted strokes for more uneven surfaces.
Non-paintbrush items that are also good for dry brushing: the scrubby side of dishwashing sponges and shower loofas.
Note: You know those really thin, grotty paintbrushes in the paint cupboard that are kind of stiff and scritchy with gaps in the bristles? DON'T THROW THEM OUT because these are the best types for dry brushing. The worst kinds of brushes for dry brushing are brand-new, synthetic brushes. If some eejit threw them out and you only have new brushes, you might need to take scissors to a few or use a scrubbing brush/diswasher sponge/loofa instead.
Glazing
Glazing involves watering down paint until it is basically tinted water, and staining surfaces with it by washing it across them or letting it drip down them. This can be done with sponges, sponge brushes, paint brushes, old dishcloths, clean paint rollers...anything that can absorb water.
Always have at least two shades of glazes for each surface you’re working on – this will emphasize the texture and ageing of the surface. Choose glaze colors appropriate for the base color – brown glazes for sandstone shades, black glazes for slate shades.* Since the wash is so thin, you can even glaze in brighter colors (red, green, blue, orange) to tint a surface.
To lightly tint a surface that’s too bright or flat, wash the glaze over the surface with a large sponge or roller. Be careful not to let too much of it collect at the bottom, or it will make everything soggy. Mop it up regularly! Water gathering for too long on plywood can even make it warp and bend.
All outdoor surfaces get water damaged to some extent (at least, they do in Northern Europe, where Shakespeare lives), and this can be recreated by streaks of slightly thicker glaze. Dip a sponge or brush in the glaze, pick a point at the top of the surface, and squeeze the brush against the surface so the water drips down it. Concentrate on points where water would tend to gather or flow down: corners, the front of stairs, spaces in between bricks etc.
N.B. This is a brilliant unskilled job to give people at put-in, as long as they remember to keep mopping up the water.
*Paint sold as black actually comes in various subtly different shades, a fact not easy to catch when they're undiluted, but that becomes very evident with glazes. Check if you have a red-, green- or blue-black before you start glazing it on. Feel free to make lots of 50 Shades of Grey jokes.
Texture paint
Good for: Stonework & brickwork that needs to look very old and/or realistic
Not good for: Any surface an actor has to sit on or interact with too much, because it is jaggy and painful and rips costumes.* If you’re making a stone wall that someone sits on, make sure there’s a texture-less part for them, and that they’re not wearing a long flow-y skirt.
* The current author had blood drawn several times during a performance of Midsummer Night’s Dream that involved both texture paint and bare legs. Be warned!
Required:
Base coat of paint
Sand (not totally necessary, but good for consistency)
Sawdust (N.B. As soon as set builds start, tell the TD/MC to collect sawdust for you, and collect all the sawdust generated during put-in. You’ll need a lot of it. If you’re still in need of some, go to the theatre arts workshop, the MIT Hobby Shop or somewhere else where a lot of woodwork is done and ask very nicely .
Various shades of glaze (discussed previously)
Texture paint is, not surprisingly, paint that has itself structural texture. This is great if you want really old, grungy, lumpy-looking stonework, and if the audience is close enough to be unconvinced by your carefully stippled pillar. The basic formula for making it is:
1. Fill a tray with a little of your base coat
2. Mix in sawdust, and a little sand. Note that I don’t put in proportions – it’s better to err on the side of more sawdust less paint, and thin out if necessary. The ideal consistency should be incredibly viscous, and should seem more like clay or cement than paint. You should be able to sculpt with it, almost like clay.
3. Apply to surface or item of choice, preferably with a trowel.
DO NOT: Paint it on as if it were paint. 1. If you can do this, it means it’s too thin 2: If your surface ends up with a flat, even layer of texture paint, *the audience will not see it. *It will show up just as a surface pattern, and that is what stippling is for. Texture paint is for creating something uneven and lumpy that will cast shadows.
4. There are various situations where you can use texture paint:
3D-brick patterns: First, tape out the brick pattern lines with painters/masking tape. Then apply a first, thick layer of texture paint. Peel away the painter’s tape while the texture paint is still wet, and you should get spaces in the texture paint corresponding to the spaces between the bricks. Let the texture paint dry and, if necessary, add further layers of texture paint onto the bricks, avoiding the spaces.
Filling in corners in stairs: There are situations where you might build a structure with 2x4s and plywood that is meant to be old stone but looks far too sharp edged. You can improve it by filling in the concave edges and rounding out the convex ones with texture paint. Crucial step: Line the edge with gaff tape, taking care to cover any screws or nails with it. If you don’t do this, strike is going to be a nightmare of chipping away texture paint in search of screws to remove. Then, slap texture paint into the edge and smooth it out, just like caulking a bathroom. You could also leave it a bit lumpier and make it into moss or dirt with painting later on.
Really old stonework: Got a flat, or pillar you want to age up? Make that texture paint as lumpy as possible and slap it on. Don’t worry about being even. That’s the point. If you want a *really* lumpy looking stone wall, use texture paint in conjunction with bits of pink/blue foam (the kind that comes in sheets). Cut out some random sections of foam and screw/nail them to your flat. Then attack them with a razor/a paint scraper/a screwdriver/a random short bit of dexion until the surface is good and pitted and you’ve knocked random lumps off the edge. Then texture-paint the entire flat + foam. The foam tactic is also a good way to make old-stone looking set-pieces.
5. Stippling
See “Stippling” section. Since the rock is already textured, it doesn’t need too much stippling, but since it is all still the basecoat colour it could benefit from a few layers of slightly-different-tone stippling.
6. Glazing
See “Glazing” section. Glazing works particularly well with texture paint, as it drips into all the little cracks and catches there. If you’re doing dark stonework, start with three different ‘blacks’, a reddish black, a bluish and greenish. Combine all of them, but go heavy on the green to create mossy or foresty-looking stone, and blue will make things look cold and bleak. Red, unsurprisingly, makes things look warmer. If you’re working with lighter, more sandstone-y colours, go for brown glazes. Only use black in very specific places (like cracks you want to emphasise).
Start with very watery glazes – this will give you general colour wash and texturing. Then thicken the glazes up to create more noticeable water stains. Note that dripping water *does* leave stains naturally on stones and bricks. If you hold your sponge or brush at the top of the wall and squeeze it, the water tends to drip down in exactly the way it would if it were a wall being rained on. Concentrate on areas where, in real life, water might gather and drip down – large gaps between stones, for example, or corners in walls, or fountains if you have any.
7. Feature stippling.
Brush-stipple black in cracks between rocks to emphasize the gaps between them. Stipple green to add moss, and white-ish to add lichen
. 
Partially glazed stonework, Midsummer Night's Dream, 2008 (set design B. Conrad and G. Kane)
Finished stone-texture wall (in background) in Midsummer Night's Dream, 2008
Fake Wood
There are many and varied ways to make old wood boards. Here are my favourites, feel free to add other ways.
Detail paint wood boards onto flats
1. Paint the basecoat colour. Don’t be alarmed if it looks appalling – most block browns do, for some reason.
2. Using a chalk-line, a 2x4 or masking tape as a guide, mark in the lines between the boards, keeping them consistently spaced.
3. Paint the lines with a dark colour and a thin brush.
4. With a dark colour, start to paint in wood grain. Start with the whorls and draw contour lines around them. Always make grain lines continuous, and remember that the grain only goes in one direction.
5. With a light colour and a small brush, paint lines approximately over (or slightly offset from) the dark grain you just painted. Use a very small amount of paint so that you’re almost dry-brushing.
6. Continue adding grain detail with alternating light and dark paint. Remember to keep stepping back and looking at it from audience-distance to determine whether you should be going lighter/darker.
7. Dry-brush a dark colour over the lines between the boards to make them less distinct (think of this as the decades of dirt collecting in between these boards.
8. Very dry dry-brush a grey over the whole thing. This should be very light, but enough to give the whole thing a dull quality. Again, keep stepping back to audience-distance to see how it looks. 
Wood texture in Merry Wives of Windsor, 2009 (set design by B. Conrad)
Make lumber yard wood look old
1. Dark varnish the wood
2. Cut thick strips of cheesecloth and wrap them around the wood.
3. Dark varnish the wood again
4. If necessary, do a grey-dust dry brush
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 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 like a painting.