skies in our eyes

Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid.

Jules Feiffer
US cartoonist & satirist (1929 - )

I've been living sky lately, haven't I? I've been a busy girl...

I did some more work on the bloody head:



This is the beginnings of the proscenium stage right:



And then there are the cloud boxes. These are 8 multi-functional boxes used throughout the show. When first seen they look like this:



Here they must work as a whole. But then the clouds must work all around each box as well. You can see some of that here on the side.



But there is more. For the banquet scene they are lined across the stage and have silhouettes of chess pieces on them.



Again it all has to work over the whole box:



And here's how I added the silhouettes.



I started with a full scale line drawing of the pieces. I used a big safety pin and a pounce wheel to poke holes in the line. That was laid over a painted box. Then I take a little muslin bag filled with powdered charcoal and "pounce" it over the holes. Let me tell you it is hard to take a picture of yourself doing this.



This is the result:



From here I ink the charcoal outline.



After that I just fill in the outline with paint. This is a good process if you have to repeat a pattern. I used a single pounce for all the fire escapes/windows in this production of West Side Story. For the reverse I merely cleaned off the pounce and flipped it over.