My final Days in Scenic Art

Can't really quite believe that another rotation is over, but scenic art has far been my favourite and I'm positive now that I want to take it as my major.

The last few days we have been working on a personal project called 'The Column Project' and I'm not going to lie it was al lright, I got rather frustrated at times as things didn't really turn out how I wanted them, and as we had a day less then everyone else Michelle, Chris and I weren't able to finish our so I guess I just keep on comparing my unfinished work to the other rotation groups.

The Project is basically I good exercise to get used to the basics of scenic art, like how to scale up a drawing, what brushes and techniques to use to get the right effect, and some basic colour mixing.


This picture shows my first approach to the project, in which I used charcoal on long stick to draw up the column and I used long pieces of wood to get straight lines.


To get a sort of marble effect we used colour washes, which basically we wetted large paintbrushes brushed the background of our boards and then went over the wet wash with a watered down yellow ochre colour.


We continued to numerous colour washes, and on the coloumn we used a raw sienna and red colour. Additionally we also began to paint in some veins.


I found the veins pretty hard to do, and as you can see from this photo I totally screwed up, my veins are far to dark and far to fat, but I had to just leave them as I was lagging behind :(


Here is the stage I finished at, we achieved the dark shadow on the right side by using a spray gun filled with a burnt umber and black colour; and on the capital i had just began painting in the main shapes and tones but as you can I didn't get very far!

Looking at these photos I'm not very happy with my work - I've got the colour completely wrong (my background is far to dark and orangey) and I'm such a slow worker so I feel I have achieved very little!

The Paint Call

On the Tuesday of this week the scenic artists had their time on the stage again to finish painting all of the floor, it was a really good thing to be apart of and taught me that being in scenic you have to be organised, get things done to a tight schedule and team work!
So here are some photos and I'll go through how we achieved the final piece!


To begin with we gridded up the floor into 1 metre square blocks then drew up the paving blocks with chalk on sticks and the others began stencilling in the doily



We then painted the base colour of the paving blocks in grey and the doily as a white cirlce




A grey/green/brown wash was then painted over the paving blocks whilst others outlined the block so that when it came to repainting the floor black the paving blocks were still rectangles.


Here is the doily painted without the grey highlights yet, so it therefore still look 3-D


We then painted the floor black to make sure everything stood out



And finally here is the end product!

All in all it was a long days hard work, but it was good fun and with so many people helping the day went pretty quick!