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.