Musical Of Musicals: The Musical - Drop Stage Shot

So here's a photo of the drop as it is in the show. Please excuse the horrible photo quality and lighting as I didn't have my tripod with me and the lighting is post show. The drop appears a bit fuzzed out because there is a scrim hanging in front of it.

Also here is a shot of the leg walls that we also did for the show.  Check out that sweet lining.  Between the flats and floor for this show and all the lining for the next show, Sleuth, not to mention Forever Plaid, I am going to be SO GOOD at lining haha.

Musical of Musicals: The Musical - Drop

So the first image is the designer's rendering for the drop. The whole rendering has a fairly loose quality with a watercolor feel, especially in the sky. The line quality was pretty heavy handed and very loose, often interacting between several different planes, such as going from  signs to the buildings.The first part of our process, after we had laid out the drop and starched, was to layout a grid and cartoon out the image.  Instead of laying out the grid and the drawing directly onto to the drop we laid it out on a large section of bogus paper.  After we had the drawing how we wanted it, we pounced the image onto the drop.  By pouncing the image to the drop instead of drawing directly on the muslin we were able to keep the charcoal to a minimum on the drop.  This was especially important since we were using fairly watered down, lighter colors.  To seal in our image so that we could begin painting without losing all our details, like the lettering, we did a quick spray of watered down plastic varnish flat.  This sealed the charcoal into the muslin but still left us with a nice surface to paint on.

Next we began to lay in the sky.  We first blocked in the different colors and then blended.  We then applied various sprays to even everything out and further blend the clouds together.

The rest of the drop was a fairly simple process.  We blocked in the buildings in a flat black, blocked in the background of the signs, and then added in the lettering.  After those main elements were all in we added some details.  These details included some blue shadowing in the buildings, the light bulbs around the signs and the flair of light from the them.  The very last step was the lining which we did with a highlight, muslin type color and a dark black.


All in all, I think it turned out fairly well.  It was a very quick drop, only took about two and a half days including all the layout and cartooning.

Heyo

So I am starting this blog as a way to keep track of the different projects that I work on as a scenic artist.  More importantly I hope to use this to serve as documentation for various processes and techniques so that I have steps to refer back to in the future.  I really wish that I had thought of this last year and kept it going through my time at Juilliard.  At any rate, I anticipate the first few projects that I'll document here will be somewhat simple as they will be pieces from the shows this summer, and since we have a two week build time there isn't a whole lot of time to fuss with details unfortunately.