The Gauze

Well I have to admit that I have been very lazy for not blogging all through the production of Merry Wives of Windsor which is the summer Opera for this year. Cordelia Chisholm is the designer again, I love her designs they are so beautiful and elegant (she is also from Motley!) So I'm going to make up for it now!

The first thing I worked on after mixing up some of the main colours for the production was the gauze. Oh the gauze. It was to be painted like wallpaper as obviously you can't see through wallpaper on a flat but through a gauze you can. I have never felt so frustrated with a set piece before. It was the first time I have ever had to work on a gauze and I felt I was thrown in with the expectation that I knew what to do as I was a third year.

So I had the task to work on the gauze from the beginning, so had to attach it to a frame and make sure that the open weave was parallel to the frame. Once this was done all I had to do was paint it quickly and then you the spray gun to push air through the weaves so no paint clogged up the material to defeat its purpose.

From the beginning of painting the gauze I didn't think the base was the right colour, and I should have mentioned this instead of just going for it. However, I didn't want to jump to conclusions and as I had been given the colour and told it was the base colour I just thought maybe the base colour had changed and didn't question it. So i went onto the next step of the gauze, lining it with thick lines, this took ages and i had to make sure it was a 100% accurate and as my maths is so bad i found this really difficult. So cut a long story short it took ages, then the gauze started to sag and then i had to re-stretch it to make it tight. Man i was hating life. Anyways I went ahead and painted the lines in, which went rather smoothly as not to blow my own trumpet i'm quite confident at doing lines now. Once i finished Gary came up to me and said it was all the wrong colour. I wanted to cry, I had spent ages on it and you only get one chance with a gauze. Thankfully though my pale spray all over the gauze did the trick but not going to lie, I was really disappointed in myself and my work. I just wish I had manned up and said something about the colour from the beginning, but when it's one of your best friend managing the show you trust her judgement more then anything.