On the Town

I've had these pictures set up to post for over a week now. I think I just want to not think about this show anymore. But here it is. These are my adventures painting On the Town.

This is what I called Girder land. Eventually these were assembled into about 20 foot tall girders, three on each side of the stage. I'll get the assembled pictures when I go for touch ups this week.


As you can see they took up most of my paint deck.



Did I mention the lights running up the side of each of these. Here are all the sockets. And more sockets.



These lovelies are the rivets. Actually this is pretty clever on the part of the scene shop. These began life as plugs or feet for conduit type metal tubes. They cut off the part that would go into the pipe and voila you have a lovely rivet looking dome. The only thing is since they are plastic it is a challenge to get the paint to stay on.



These are the beautiful light fixtures that I was forced to paint to match said girders. That was the painful part. Sometimes in this job you have to take something really beautiful and make it ugly. It's enough to make you cry sometimes. I didn't use a primer and the blue is a latex so we are hoping to get the paint off after.



On to the other set elements. What is to follow is a bunch of before and after bits, so not a lot of description will be required.


Kitchen cart before and after.





Piano before and after.



Window...I don't seem to have a before. This was pretty much the only piece that wasn't straight color. It fades from the lighter brown in the top left corner to a darker brown to the bottom right.






Subway before and after.





Stage before and after.


Stage with its "footlights".





Nedick's counter before and after. This was one of those drawings that wasn't exactly in scale.



Cafe sets before... I have a few more step by step of these to show how I painted them without killing my back.


Painting the underside.


Painting the top.


The gold set (yes the table is a different color)

and the matching sign.


The 'red' set (the table and one chair match, other chairs different colors)





The sign during and after painting.



The blue set (again table and chair match, other chairs different colors)





Sign during and after.




This project was fun. This is a dinosaur skeleton that is knocked down in the action of the musical. Each piece is attached to a stick and held up by a crew member. The two legs have handles on the back for the same reason. I haven't seen how the tumble is choreographed but it should be interesting. I was very happy how this came out.

Lined and cut out luan.


Primed...you can still see the sharpie lines through the primer.


Painted in shadow color.


Then paint the bone color.


Then the black. The black just made the whole thing pop.


Here it is. I may have to hang this on the shop walls after the show. I became very fond of "Rex".


And here it is all in the end of my shop ready to go.


This was a finished a few weeks ago. I've since moved on to the next show. This one was a bit of a hassle due to the designer. I was emailed paint chip numbers which I had to find at Home Depot. I mixed the bulk of the color myself using scenic paints. Only the girders we had mixed at the store to have a paint with sheen. My biggest frustration were the "paint elevations" that he emailed me. Just slapping a scale legend on them (a box that tells you what scale a drawing is in eg. 1'=1" or 1'=1/2") does not make the drawing in scale. Six or seven out of my nine elevations were not in scale. I luckly won't be meeting this designer. He was here only for the weekend and will be gone by the time I'm back at work on Monday.

So there it is. I'm completely psyched about the next show. Lots of fun and painterly stuff.