Cassandra Phillips: Scenic Artist
 
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This week, The Unfortunates goes into tech rehearsal.   The drops, scrims  and rear projection screens are hung, the bird is lit, the final rust has been added to the metal and char added to the wooden floor.  As we finish touching it up, Thayne and I head out the the warehouse to begin work on an enormous and highly detailed plexiglass window.   

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This awesome version of A Streetcar Named Desire is designed by our very own Associate Artistic Director, Christopher Acebo.  The set has an ultimately masculine feel, employing harsh angles and lighting effects, black rubber mats and expanded steel mesh. The featured element is a giant ornate window.  

The finished window will be 40' by 17' and is made up of ten individual panels connected together to create a huge window running from the top of the Kowalski's residence to the top of the procenium. The window will be decorated with the ornate design pictured right.  It provides partial privacy and partial translucency to the upstairs neighbors' residence as well as alludes to the high density of other people's homes and windows.  

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In order to achieve this effect, we used a video projector and laptop to project each panel's design on the plexiglass and trace the design on the paper covers with permanent markers. 



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Tracing the projection on the paper.  

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Next we cut out the designs with exacto knives.

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Leaving the negative space attached to the plexi, we can use it as a masking frisket.  

Next week, we will spray the windows with pneumatic sprayers.  When we are done, we'll remove the rest of the paper, leaving the painted design.  


Check back next week to see the completed window!


 
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The return of Thayne! 

This week, we continued the painting of our architectural "double" translucency.  I'm still calling it a double, because the audience will see two different things when lit two different ways, even though all of the painting was done on the front.  I developed this "front only" painting technique to save us the time it would take to flip the drop and starch multiple times.  




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In our last episode, we left our characters after stage one, where they put the translucent black and opaque black layers down on the drop.  This week, we had to go back over the entire thing to paint in our opaque whites.  Remember that anything that was going opaque white had to be painted opaque black first.  Finally, this drop is starting to look like the elevation.  

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The final stage of this drop was to age and contour the white.  It was very mind-boggling to keep in mind that anything that read as grey on the rendering had to be painted out opaque black, then opaque white, then grey last and on top, whereas anything reading as red on the elevation would be painted translucent black.  We really had to use our imaginations on this one and had to paint from TWO elevations simultaneously instead of just one.   Usually a scenic artist is asked to paint a the drop to look like the picture.  In this case, we needed to imagine what the drop WILL look like.  



In this video, you can see how we used a kitchen broom and some garden sprayers to create a drippy look to bring this drop together.  
The slideshow at right shows our drop hung in the space along with some shots showing how it interacts with the scrims we painted earlier.  It's been very exciting to see our work coming together.   

 We completed this doosy from layout to pickup in 10 days with only three scenics per day.  

 We rocked. it. out.  Nice work, guys!
 
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The final and the most labor intensive layer to the back wall of the Unfortunates set is a full-stage translucent drop.   The fun part is that it is slightly more complicated than a traditional translucency.



The drop will be lit from the front with white light and lit from behind with red light.  When lit from the front, the picture needs to be in greyscale and when lit from behind with the red light, only some parts are red, while others need to stay in greyscale.  This means that there need to be both translucent and opaque parts to the drop that transition softly into each other.  On top of all that, it is a very architectural piece- lots of windows, doors, chair rail, et cetera.  What an adventure!

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In this picture of Scenic Designer Sibyl Wickersheimer's elevations, we see how the drop will appear when lit from behind and in front, respectively, and we see how in the red elevation, some parts need to remain opaque white.  

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Measuring 65 by 17 feet, this drop took four people and two days to starch both sides and an extra day to cartoon.  


Right, our intern, Erin Young, does some scenic math to divide these windows perfectly.  

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The next step was to paint the entire drop in translucent greyscale.  
As you can see in this picture, we had to paint from the rendering showing us wich parts would be translucent, and thus showing up as red when lit from behind.  On top of that, in order to make the white step as opaque as it needs to be in the next step, everything that is going opaque white needed to go opaque black first. SO.... So what we are doing is painting everything we see as red on the rendering as variances in the black's translucency, and everything we see as white we are painting straight black.

Confused yet?

So far  we have completed the translucent layer.  Next week we will put the opaque white layer on top to complete the drop- more pictures to come!

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I'm really proud of how far we've gotten in only a few days.  It's a real testament to the industriousness of our crew.  Good work, scenic artists Amanda Haverick and  Kira Nehmer and intern Erin Young!

 
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This week has been full of fulfillment as we check pieces of Unfortunates off of our to do list.  'Manders, Erin and Kira finish the burn/singe  treatment to the edge of the elevator platform.  Next, the tile will be sealed with satin and a flat will be blocked on to give a worn and uneven finish.  



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Meanwhile, Pat finishes up the plaster beams for the bar

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...and Gabriel finishes the 
King Jesse's Kingdom signs.  

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Out at the warehouse, Kira and I faux stain the wood planked floor.  

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...and add some charring effects around the trap holes.  These holes are where the elevator platforms are and will be covered with the tiles.  



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It has been really exciting to watch the carpenters stretch the scrims we painted on the hard scenery it will be attached to for the show.


Nice to get a little taste of what the show will look like!

 
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The youngest of our three theatres, what we call "The New Theatre," (left) opened 10 years ago and has waited as long to get a name.  But, thanks to a generous $4.5 million donation near the end of last season by a group of big-money contributors, it will soon be known as the "Thomas Theatre." 



Marty Hughley of the Oregonian writes:

"A decade ago, Jo Lynn Allen, co-founder and president of the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, opted not to name the theater, even though the foundation had been the lead donor behind construction of the facility.

The group includes the Goatie Foundation, Roberta and David Elliott, and Helen and Peter Bing. According to an OSF press release, it was someone from the Goatie Foundation who sought out the other donors in order to be able to name the theater after Peter D. Thomas, who worked at the festival for decades, and served as development director from 1997 until his death in 2010.

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The money donated will be used for the OSF artistic opportunity fund (a pool of money established through donations in 2009, intended to supplement the regular artistic budget) and for the planned renovation of the festival’s current First Street production building into a rehearsal space.

The latter project --  to be named the Hay Patton Rehearsal Center, after longtime designer Richard Hay and former executive director William Patton -- is contingent on the finding of a new home for the production departments."   
The Oregonian

This donation has been exciting news to us in the production department.  It means a brand new production building, designed and built just for us.  Our recently retired Executive Director, Paul Nicholson, has made it his goal to head up the fundraising and overseeing of this project before fully retiring.  

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Our property has been purchased, and blueprints have been passed around, edited and approved, and in this picture, you can see they are already breaking ground!  



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The site of our future home as viewed from the West.  



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Mr. Nicholson has continued to keep us in the loop sending us pictures like these and happy progress reports.  

We are so lucky to have this opportunity and I can't explain our excitement and anticipation.  Speaking for the paint department alone, we will more than quadruple the space of our current shop, we will have a paint frame, a huge mixing area, two sinks, and more!   

I can't wait to walk into that brand new clean shop- AND GET PAINT EVERYWHERE!!!

 
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This week, our exchange artist, Kira Nehmer and I have been hard at work on the scrims and backdrops for our upcoming production of "The Unfortunates."   It has been a real pleasure working with and getting to know Kira, and I have learned so much from her.  Among many things, she taught us how to make the ultimate scrim picks.  The design comes from her Charge Scenic Artist, Jim Medved at the Milwaukee Repertory theater and involves hot-gluing the tines from a binder clip into a skinny cartooning sized bamboo and then securing them with gaff or in our case, colorful spike tape.  They looked like little aliens to us, so we added eyeballs just for fun, but they would work just as amazing if you left them out.  

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In my previous blog, I talked about and showed the bounce drop being painted by Kira, Amanda and Erin.  Kira and I dealt with the final darkening and touch up.  Here's what we have to show for it!  A nice 25% grey bounce to catch the light behind the scrims.   
Our scenic designer, Sibyl Wickersheimer loved the watercolor quality, and so do we! 

As I mentioned before, this show has so many layers and lighting effects.  I can't wait to see them all together.  

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The scrims were similar to the bounce, but in dank colors of umbers and siennas.  We brought in some of the greys and blues from the bounce to tie the two together.  We used brushes to hold true to the brushy, panel-like qualities and garden sprayers to soften the overall look.  

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Here is one of our awesome scrim picks in use!

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It is relevant to note that this process was extremely challenging due to the need to rep the scrims.  Instead of being able to paint a full-stage sized scrim and hang it as is, we needed to paint it in pieces so that it could be taken apart and stored.  The top panels were to be mounted permanently to hard scenery,  and the lower panels to the far right and left were equipped with velcro, and are to be temporarily mounted to a hard frame, while the bottom center panels are pleated and flowing and to be put on traveller tracks.  We needed precise measurements, allowing for extra runoff to be wrapped around the hard scenery.  We also needed to do something I have never done before: paint a pleated scrim.  This required a lot of moving the scrim around with our feet and spraying and painting it in sections so the folds would not leave hard lines when we sprayed them.  

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Here I am putting the final darkening spray around the edges of the scrim.  

Below: A detail shot of the finished scrim.
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Ready for our next project!

 
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This week in the shop, we have been working VERY hard on our upcoming  production of "The Unfortunates."  A world premier musical, it promises to be moving, entertaining, frightening, and fun. 

 From the OSF website: 
"A musical pilgrimage through uniquely American genres delivers five prisoners to salvation — or at least keeps the terror at bay. Facing an uncertain end, they bring to life the story of Big Joe, a tough bartender who risks everything to save the armless courtesan Rae from a deadly plague. Combining the heat of a gospel revival with the sweet sorrow of the blues, 'The Unfortunates' convinces us that any great challenge can be faced with dignity, grace, and compassion."

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This show is filled with layers, including a backdrop, several scrims, a bounce, rear projection screens, and even a detailed tile floor.  

Here, you see Amanda Haverick, Kira Nehmer and Erin Young painting the bounce in an airy smoky print.  

In order to create the intricate tile pattern, we developed an assembly line of applying a vinyl stencil to each tile and rolling on the paint.  The slideshow below shows scenic artists Amada Haverick, Kira Nehmer and I as well as our intern Erin Young laying out the tiles, applying the stencils using transfer tape, and adding the finishing paint strokes with a pencil eraser. 
First, the shop cut more than 700 individual tiles from masonite, a board made of woodpulp and glue, and sorted them into stacks to be painted in three different styles. Two are reletively plain, while the remaining 400 display a fairly intricate 5 color cloud and triangle pattern. To create this intricate pattern quickly and efficiently, we decided to use the vinyl cutter to create a stencil. The vinyl cutter is a fantastic tool in the likeness of a printer, but instead of printing with ink, the printer in equipped with a tiny knife that cuts a design into a giant vinyl sticker that we buy by the roll. The cutter can make many copies of the same sticky stencil very quickly and then all we have to do is apply the design to the tiles and paint them as we would a stencil. First, we remove the sections that are to be painted grey, and paint them, then remove more of the design and paint them the next color, blue, and so on. In this way, we can paint each color of each section and then finally remove the last of the vinyl, leaving a perfectly clean painted tile. Then we need to seal them to look glazed, and age them.


Since the tile floor belongs to a bombed out bar, the tiles needed to look old and broken. Now comes the fun part: In some cases, all we needed to do was chip the paint or let some of the vinyl rip some paint off leaving a burnt look, but in others, we actually got to break the tiles in half, or break off corners to give them a chipped look. All of the tiles will get an uneven brown grungy wash. The final look will be achived when they are mounted in the Thomas Theatre in their patterns around the traps in the floor to look like open holes left from a bombardment.




 
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This week in the paint shop, we have been finishing up some loose ends on our upcoming production of King Lear.  Here, you can see our Lead Scenic Thayne Abraham painting some faux rocks and coming down from heaven.

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For the storm scene in the play, we wanted there to be a storm shelter (sort of Wizard of Oz style)  that he could escape into.  It was supposed to look like cement with flagstones stuck in it and an old wooden ladder.  




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The stones were carved from foam, sanded and coated and then painted to give them all the essential highlights and shadows.  

Left, Thayne uses his favorite technique, dry brushing to bring out the high points and get the perfect highlight. 

The floor of King Lear was especially challenging and exciting.  The entire play takes place on a giant antiqued mirror.  Below, you can see a slideshow of our progress.  

We coated the floor with a near indestructable clear sealer that is industrially used to seal statues and airplanes, and got to work with rags and tinted sealer to create the levels of age at the edges.  Scenic Designers can give a paint department several recources from which to work, but the most important, I feel is research.  Research can be one or many  images taken from books or magazines or the internet of examples of what he/she would like to see.   They give us a better understanding of what is in the Designer's head and to get and idea of the feel of what we are painting.  Another rescource is the Rendering, or an actual image created by the Designer of exactly what he/she wants to see.  Every scrape, every dot of color is planned. We just make this image bigger.  It was really interesting to really look at the way a mirror ages.  It has so many different colors to it as the backing is peeled away.  I really thought there would only be one- perhaps a muddy brown, or even a duller grey.  But, as we studied the image, we found soft browns as well as gentle blues and even hot rusty reds and oranges.  

The shapes were very organic.  We would lay down a glaze and let it set up and then polish some away with a rag or dry brush.  Or sometimes we would wait for it to dry completely and scrub some away with a brillo pad or dab some away with alcohol on a cotton swab or rag.  And in some instances, we crated a resist with water in a sprayer soon after laying color down.  
 
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This week, the shops have been busy working on My Fair Lady.  As the electricians focus the lights, the carpenters put their last welds on the railings and the prop-eteers hang the last crystals on this fantastic chandelier.  

The concept for My Fair Lady has a lot to do with transformation.  The set is open, and the audience can see the back wall of the theater.  The actors don't leave the stage.  Instead, they sit in antique theater seats upstage where the audience can see them change minor elements of their costumes.  


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It is always exciting to fit a show into a space and see how all of our hard work has paid off.   This one is so different than any of the other sets we are doing this season, I can't wait to see it under lights.  

My favorite part of the set are the fake paint spills and bucket marks we put on the wooden floor.  



Alex Meyer, right, the carpentry intern, puts the molding around the frosted windows we created for the pub. 

In the slideshow below, you can see a detail shot of the window, along with a few of the awesome props that will provide context for the scenes of the play.  



 
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We're back to work here as OSF, already elbow deep in our 2013 season. This year, we have so many great shows including a Rockabilly version of Taming of the Shrew, an in-the-round interpretation of King Lear, which takes place on a giant antique mirror, and an uber-realistic Two Trains Running, a very exciting August Wilson that takes place in my hometown, Pittsburgh.

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Over the past few weeks, we've gotten so much done!  

The first show we painted was Taming of the Shrew.  
The show takes place at a run down Coney Island-like amusement park, full of fun quirky details found on the boardwalk of yesteryear.  Complete with posters for freak shows, signs for  food and games, and lots of bright colors,  this set was as much fun to paint as it will be to watch.  My favorite part was painting the door to the funhouse.   Shaped like a clown's head, the patron would have to walk in his mouth to enter.  The top of his head is on fire and painted with iridescent paint, to give him a hot-rod edge.  There will also be a fully lit ferris wheel and even a roller coaster! 

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Next, we dove straight into Two Trains Running.  The show takes place in a well-kept but run down diner in the 60's.  This set was super realistic, so we paid careful attention to where the dirt would collect and where the scuffs would be and that kind of thing.  In the picture to the left, Scenic Artist Amanda Haverick puts some finishing touches on the coca-cola sign she also painted.  Sometimes it can be hard to put a lot of time into making something look beautiful and fresh, and then having to cover it up with dirt, but our 'Manders is the consumate professional and adds not only dirt, but water damage and rust as well as scrapes away some letters. 

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As you can see in the short slideshow above, the set has an entire street upstage of the main set complete with storefronts, broken windows, and overgrown sidewalks.  The three women at right are busy carefully selecting the right plants (some of which are real and found locally) and gluing them to the cracks.  

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The result of thier work is very convincing!  I think this is one of the coolest parts of the set.  

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Our efforts to make this set realistic have seemed to pay off.  Here, Lead Scenic Thayne Abraham enjoys his sandwich at the cafe counter. 


Cassandra Phillips: Scenic Artist