Welcome to the Paint Shop

Hi there and welcome to the paint shop! My name is Julie and I will be your blogger. Let me start out by answering some questions. First of all you're probably wondering what this is about which requires a few other answers so we start at the beginning...

I was born in a palace by the sea!... wait. no. wrong beginning and not my story.

I'm a scenic artist. Now for most of the world out there that doesn't know what that means let me paint you a picture...

You walk into a theatre- not a movie theater, a theatre theater with actors and an audience and playwrights and lights and sound and scenery! Now imagine if you will, or if you can, that the actors are standing on essentially pieces of wooden scaffolding or wooden boxes...probably kind of ambiguous and you don't know where you are. Now imagine there are trees and mountains and all sorts of natural wonders on stage -- you know where you are now? or at least have an idea?

That's what a scenic artist does; not just the trees and mountains and natural wonders etc... because god only knows what a set designer will come up with in their pretty little heads, but it's just that, whatever the designer comes up with we create. Primarily with paint but really with whatever we find we need and can use. We don't do all of this alone. There are plenty more amazingly talented people who are in charge of building the sets and the furniture and the costumes and the hairs on the actors' heads but we're a piece of that puzzle.

I'm doing this for a variety of reasons:

First- I've always wanted to give some sort of representation of my 'world' out into the "real" world. Some jobs make for great movie or novel characters but in my experience movies about the people who make movies or theater tend to fail. or suck. I couldn't see a way of making it into a story so today I landed on this idea of documenting what I do and how I do it like this in a real way.

Secondly- Like I just said, to document what I do and how I do it. I'm a first year graduate student here at school to learn the art of scenic art (yes embrace the repetition) and this is a way for me to document what I do and what I learn in a way that maybe could help other scenics and in a way that I can look back on and revisit for good ideas and good lessons. This is my digital notebook.

Thirdly- Still going off the first point, to give some sort of idea to my non-theater friends and family what the hell it is I do and maybe provide an easy to follow explanation for other people to explain.

Okay so let's dive in...

Right now I am quite literally waiting for paint to dry. It happens often.

What I'm currently working on is my spray project for scene painting 1 class. Each person chose a picture from a pile of options and we now have to recreate that picture on a 4 foot by 8 foot flat - a standard piece of scenery not unlike a big canvas.

This is what mine looks like or well, what it hopefully will look like when I'm done. Now the key to this project is to do it only with a hand sprayer and various types of masking. Masking is whatever stops the paint from reaching a surface. As you'll see if this all works out is that masking can be just about anything.

Thus far I've only done a sample for the clouds which currently looks like this:

.. in this case the masking is saw dust.

So far, here is what I've learned from my sample (some of these I already knew but it's hard to listen to at 12:30 AM):

Patience is incredibly necessary!

Thin dry layers will build much better than multiple wet layers which has resulted in uneven drying and taking longer to dry.

Masking around the flat to keep it from getting on other people's flats or on other things will be very important...

I may need to change one or more of my colors or add one.

I may want to invest in a second sprayer.

This is going to take a long time.

Anyway here we are without sawdust

Making a little more sense now?