Week 5

This was such a good week, I finally felt like I was getting into the swing of things. Yup, okay construction was a bit behind and I was becoming increasingly more worried about this, but we had lots of extra helping hands from four more Technical First Year students.

Jude, Lee, Rosie and Gillian carried on working away on the village flat, where as Rose and I started to tackle the back wall and the front wall extensions.

The back wall was so easy and quick to paint, it was such a fluid technique of big thick brush strokes. On the other hand, the front wall extensions cause some problems so we had to use the spray gun to 'hide' our technique - with scenic art you don't want to obviously show how you created a look!

Once again the Technical First Year students were great and really enthusiastic. They got stuck into all the work, asked questions and I felt I did a pretty job managing them as I was running out of work for them. I gave the first years the tasks of helping paint the mini turrets (we finally got these from props, yay!) and sorting out the crowns. Oh god the crowns. These where a farce, there where so many of them, 3 different sizes, 3 different colours, and some of the crowns faced left and some faced right. It was a mind er boggler! However, in good stage management style the first years got them all sorted out! However, when we came to the paint the crowns, the paint started to crack as we had used PVA to prime them (this cause cracking if you don't let it dry enough) so we had to used good old (expensive) convent primer. 

By the end of week 5, we had finished:

• The back wall
• One of the headers for the bridge
• 4 out of the 5 village flats
• The front wall extensions
• 4 Turrets

It was quite an achievement seeming, Gary was off sick on the Wednesday and I was left to the man the fort again and some people where off ill during that week too!