'shroom!

A page of research to work from. Given by scenic designer Michael Giannio.

Our outdoor season is full of automation and magic.  There are traps and roll drops, things to climb and swing on, doors to appear and disappear from- lots of places for fairies to hide.  One entrance will be made through a giant mushroom large enough for a little girl to come through.  It also needed to be short enough to easily be carried away by two other fairies.  Due to these size and shape restrictions, the mushroom needed to be built and carved into a fairly unrealistic shape.  It was up to me to paint this not-to-scale beastie to be magical enough to exist in the enchanted forest, but realistic enough that the audience would buy it's shape.  

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The stump was based in a nice cream, then washed with a slightly darker cream (+ a bit of burnt sienna) to deepen the valleys.  Using an airbrush, I brought the burnt sienna down from the top of the stump and blended it out into the cream as I went down.  I used a similar technique at the bottom to bring in the color of the floor to root the mushroom in the space.  A drybrush of near white brought out the high points, and lastly, a shadow was added.  

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The cap was almost completely airbrushed.  The lip was white peeking over from the delicate underside.  The white soon became a raw sienna followed by a burnt sienna, a burnt umber right at the halo, and then back to burnt sienna again.  Last the very top was kissed with a translucent white to make it look almost imperceptibly brighter.  

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The underside of the cap was tricky because the shape of the stump was not to scale with the cap.  If I had painted it the way it was physically, it wouldn't make sense.  The eye knows what the bottom of a mushroom cap looks like, so, I thought, better give 'em what they want.  

I sculpted the center disc from clear matte gel, a product we order from Nova.  I tried to give it a slight bit of texture so it would read as being popped off or broken off.  I then added textured gills radiating out from it, and darkened the area where the gills meet the edge of the cap to faux in depth there.  

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And here it is- the finished mushroom.  

Convincing?

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