Scrim...

How I hate thee...

For those not of the theatrical ilk, scrim is this wondrous material that designers love and painters hate. Here is a good example of what it looks like. It has to be painted in light mulitple layers, as not to fill the holes. One must also constantly pick at it to keep it from gluing itself to the paper as it dries. Since you are painting threads with holes, the paint on the paper underneath can deceive you as to how the actual scrim itself looks. It just is a finikey product that causes me to compose songs about how much I hate it as I paint it. Plus as the paper wrinkles with moisture underneath it creates a fabulous moire effect that does not go well with morning sickness. (oh, by the way, I'm pregnant)

But here it is...

This is what I get when it comes out of the box. From this I will cut my pieces and attempt to square them up. This is far easier on a scrim that is a sewn as a finished drop, but not always. These will be stretched over steel frames that will track on and off as well as fly out. Only half my floor is papered here because I ran out. It was that kind of week.



Here I have drawn squared out boxes on the papered floor to the size needed (finished size plus extra for wrapping). Then I primed it with four light sprays of thinned out white latex paint. Each spray is done from a different direction in an attempt to get all of the threads. I have no clue if that actually works, but it's what I do. Sort of my own little old painter's tale. You can see numbers and lines on the floor to mark out the scrim in one foot increments. This is to help me keep my place while painting the design.



I begin with the botom blue sprays. I did this with a Binks automotive spray gun.



Then I laid in the base green at the top.



From there I finessed and futzed with it until it looked like the drawing below. Then I gently pulled the staples and rolled them on to tubes to await load-in.



The colors on the rendering below are a bit different from the actual hard copy that I have to work from. I think I did well. We will see when it is stretched in the theatre and hung in place. I'll have pictures once we load in...sometime in April.



So there it is...on to the next project