2nd Week of Scenic Art

Eventhough its my second week in Scenic, it sort of feels like my first as last week I was on Outpost. Its only been two days in but its been really good, the department is so nice and Joanne has been great, she really knows her stuff and I feel I can ask her about anything I am having trouble with.

Yesterday Michelle and I learnt the a+b=c rule (pythagoras theorem) from Garry which allowed to make sure the canvas we were painting as an awning for one of the stalls in the opera Albert Herring was accurate, it turned out okay however sometimes we bleed out of the lines making our stripes look a bit odd, but thankfully those could be touched up!

Today we had a paint call in the new athenaeum theatre, which meant from 9 until about 6 o'clock the scenic art department had an allocated time slot on the stage to get the back the wall of the ath painted - we had to paint the background of a mountainous horizon and to touch up the black. The task seemed pretty straight forward but it was actually quite hard and had to be precisely done. To begin begin with Joanne scaled up the model of the background, which she and Louisa then began to sketch on the wall with chalk in a grid that Michelle, Chris and I had marked out. The painting of the background took quite a while as we only had one zip frame and we had to wait for the first base coat of grey to dry before we painted a grey wispy effect on top. Creating the the wispy effect was also quite challenging as I found when I was up close up to the wall i thought it didn't look right and wasn't blending in, however when I looked up from the stage floor it looked it fine!



Chris looking rather shuffed after finishing the base coat of grey!


So today I learn some good basics:
*How to grid up on the back wall of theatre (always remembering to start from the centre!)
*That to reach higher areas with a paint brush - simply tape the brush onto a stick!
*Always step back from your work now and then to look at it from a different perspective