Translucent Drop: Electric Boogaloo

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.  

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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!