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.

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

sockets 1

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

sockets 2

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.

rivits

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.

Painting lights

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 1
Kitchen cart before and after.
kitchen cart 2



piano before
Piano before and after.
Piano 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.

Window after



subway before
Subway before and after.
subway after



Stage before
Stage before and after.
Stage after

Stage with its "footlights".
Stage with footlights



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


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

Painting the underside.
Chair bottom

Painting the top.
Chair top

The gold set (yes the table is a different color)
Gold cafe set
and the matching sign.
diamond eddies

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


conga in progress

The sign during and after painting.
congacabana


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


Slambang in progress

Sign during and after.

Slambang sign


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.
Dinosaur before

Primed...you can still see the sharpie lines through the primer.
primed and lined

Painted in shadow color.
Shadow

Then paint the bone color.
bone

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

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

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

1 comment:

Ms. Rachel said...

When I read your comment about painting the plastic I remembered a relatively new product that Glidden came out with. It's a primer called Gripper. It's wicked strong. It even sticks to vinyl siding. It smells slightly less disgusting than bin123

Greetings from the Orange Box.

Miss you