Final Bits and Bobs

Lee wasn't in today so I got put on the face of the Demon Cave, which I was pretty scared about as A) I didn't want to muck up his work so far and B) its quite an integral part of the cave! Jude and Suzie did assist me at points to speed up the process as it had to be on the van at 2pm to take down to the set, and I think overall it looks really quite good!

Fly away Demon Wings

Yay! We got the wings done!

Tired - Brain also seems not to be working

So tired today, and I felt I was just not very good at painting today - my brushstrokes all just seemed a tad mental! We worked late today as the van to take the 'demon cave wings' comes on thursday at 2pm so we really need finish them! They are made out of a sort of strong foam material which was pretty hard to prime as it sucked up the paint like a sponge, however by 8.15pm I think we were all shattered that we called it a night ... so hopefully we shall get them finished tomorrow.

I also worked on the pyramid door today, it took me a while to find the right technique. To begin with I thought it looked like total rubbish but after some helpful hints from head scenic artist Sarah and my tutor Gary, Suzie and I managed to make blend the colours really well and I'm rather happy with the end result.

Gosh its only 21.41pm but I think I need to go to bed, I'm so tired ... can't wait for everything to be done - we've been working on Aladdin for 12weeks now!

Funny Friday

Friday was not a good day for me, I just felt so funny/ill and it was really getting to me.

A step backwards

Wahoo we finished the throne! I'm rather pleased with the overall finish, even though in the photo you can't really see the stone texture that Sophie and I created by rolling crushed up newsprint across it.

Oh dear just when we were just getting into the swing of things, picking up the pace and really getting into the panto we've had to take a step backwards instead of a step forward :( Why I hear you cry? Well there is just not enough stuff for us to paint, and now construction have to spend all there time making the largest flat (the palace scene) so we have nothing to do up until Thursday :( As a result we have been allowed to start some personal projects. I have decided to paint a section of the Berlin Wall, 'Bruderkiss' - the famous painting by Russian Artist, Dmitri Vrubel depicts the iconic image of East Germany's Leader Erich Honecker and the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev sharing a kiss. I choose this as I want to get better at drawing on a larger scale, I like how its rather controversial and I think I'll be able to execute some good scenic art skills in this piece.

Dragons, Glitter and a Take-Away Box

Well .... the flat I was working on yesterday (the Dragon Palace House) took me so much longer then I expected as I kept on finding ways to make it look better. For example with my timings I had totally forgot to compensate for a Trompe L'oiel effect shadow under the roof, I didn't realise how difficult it was going to be to draw the dragons' faces and I had to touch up a couple of my lines. Anyhoo, I got the flat done after lunch and all in all I was pretty pleased with my work, especially the purple roof.

Today, there hasn't been much work coming through from construction so in a sort of a backwards step I've been able to take my time on things. I worked on the Palace throne today in which I glued the glitter highlights on, in this task I learnt from my mistakes a) choose carefully where to add the glitter (in my first attempt the dragons looked like they were wearing wigs!) and b) that before you put the gold glitter on make sure you paint a gold outline before just incase the glitter falls off. I was pretty happy in the end with my 'glittering' but golly I did take too much time on it!

I got frustrated with myself today when doing the 'Chinese Take-away Box', I have no idea why I found it so difficult to draw the two oriental T's on front as they were rather simple! I'm guessing I was thinking so much about them that I got totally worked up and just couldn't function right, but thankfully they looked alright in the end.

Touch Ups

For once I am beginning to be a bit more chuffed with my work! Today I went back to the paint frame after vector works for an hour and half to help out, as eeeep we only have 2weeks left of panto! Anyhoo I was back on toning down the vibrant colours on one of the flats which I used a white was wash to do so. Despite my lines looking a bit wobbly (will have to do something about them!) I'm confident I'll get this piece complete before lunch tomorrow :)

Mistakes!

I don't know why I found this piece so frustrating, I just kept on making mistake and when i looked back at the model piece it seemed rather easy and shouldn't have found it so hard! I found drawing the curves at the top above the door way really hard, and i seemed to keep on making more mistakes when I was trying to speed up as at the start of the day we were told we needed to pick up our working speed. I think I'm just scared of making mistakes, and my work looking really rubbish so I take my time so that I don't need to redo it. Urghhhh this is an area I do really need to improve on: getting quicker! Apart from that, the rest of the piece went rather well, actually that is a bit of a lie as I needed to go round the door frame and the and circles with a lighter wash as we had made colours to dark and not very interesting. However, looking at my photo's I think the end piece looks rather good :)

Palace Vases

Rose and I worked on the palace vases, which was a fun task as we got to use Glitter - wooo! Getting the main colours and painting the vases went rather well, however we faced some difficulties when mixing the metallic gold for the highlights, but after getting a quick lesson from Gary I think we the vases looked just like the model pieces. The only part of the vases I found really difficult was painting on the the small eyes, as I kept on mucking them up (i think i redid them about 4 times) and I think this has showed me that I have to get better at creating small details with a large brush

Management Project

I originally chose to do one of the street houses for my management but after some thought it seemed to daft on a flat which was actually not as complex as i first thought. Therefore I chose to manage the upstage cavecloth as I had to be on it straight from the start and it was a great learning curve. To begin with the cloth had a major problem;it was shorter then 6m which made things very awkward as being the first upstage cloth it was crucial it looked immaculate. To conquer this problem we decided to grid up the cloth as normal and then to attach a 'pocket' to make the cloths length add up to 6m. Painting the cloth went pretty smoothly as we had already painted the other 'cave cloths' using the same repetitive brushstrokes. However, things did become a little bit frustrating as we went a bit too dark so we had to go over with a light wash. The end product of the cloth looked great, and you couldn't tell that cloth was actually too short when we started!

Bad at blogging

I have been so bad recently at blogging, I don't know why I haven't found time to do it - to be honest I have just been lazy but her here is to making a conscious effort to start blogging regularly again. Anyhoo back to Aladdin the panto and my time in scenic. Its been alot of hard work, sometimes I feel myself getting annoyed that I make stupid mistakes like painting rubbish lines, or having to many holidays in my paint work but i'm getting angry as well as upset with myself because I am defiantly the slowest person in the department. Sometimes I stand back from my work and I can't believe how long it took me to do it, so I'm going to try so much harder to pick up the pace.

My First Panto Flat

I was originally going to choose this flat (one of street houses) for my management project, however after completing it - I felt it wasn't as challenging as I first thought. However, I worked on this flat from start to finish, I gridded and drew it up (not going to lie I found it so tricky at first!) as well as doing the majority of the paint work on it (Sarah did help me a lot though!)
I'm pretty pleased with the end result, I enjoyed creating the movement in the colours as the model pieces were rather bland due to the fact they were painted by the designer using flat colours. However I learnt from Gary that block colours aren't very nice on the eyes and adding movement using different brush strokes and leaving holidays (gaps in the paintwork) make the pieces more aesthetically appealing.

Start of Second Year

It's been a while now, well like the whole summer since I've last blogged and I really need to get back into the swing of it! I guess I should try set a two nights each week to blog and reflect ... okay so now I have that in type, I will make a conscious effort to blog!

Anyhoo, since September I have been helping out with the panto for this year, which is Aladdin. Despite giving up a month of my summer, I found going in to help on the cloths really really useful in my understanding of Scenic Art. Already I feel I know so much more and I feel I have gotten much more confident in my painting. I have spent a lot of time on the cloths, and so far i have learnt:

-How to pin up a cloth on the paint frame
-How to grid and scale up a cloth
-Understanding processes of painting to get the final look of the piece