Guild of Scenic Artists: Raise your hand if you have had the luxury of painting an all black set. More than one? Was it a glossy all black set? If your hand is still raised then we should sit down and have a beer together, because you have first hand knowledge of how hard it is to keep black pretty.
3 comments:
I've known about Vantablack and the Anish Kapoor color feud since it began just because of how funny it is, but in addition to being entertaining this article was also very interesting in explaining the differences between working with different blacks and why certain things look darker than others do. For set design, especially, many designers want to use black and the perpetual problem is the black paint not being dark enough for getting dirty quickly and becoming dingy or looking too matte. I would love someone to find a way to fix THAT problem, not just that the black isn't dark enough but that the finish on the paint dirties so quickly. While gloss is an option, that has issues of application and maintenance. Making black paint with a semi-gloss, perhaps, or a new finish to keep of dirt while staying low maintenance would be interesting to figure out and very welcome in the theater community. I don't know of any ways to do it, but if anyone else does have ways I was simply unaware of please let me know! I'm always open to learning more and growing my skillset and my knowledge about things.
This is all fine in theory but no one is ever going to paint a stage in Vantablack. If you read the Q&A on the Vantablack website you learn that 1. Vantablack is easily damaged when touched and therefore would be terrible for a stage floor, 2. Vantablack requires specialist application and is therefore completely impractical for coating a stage floor and 3. Vantablack is not available for artistic use other than Kapoor Studios. So while I agree it would be cool if there was some super black paint that could be used for stage floors that would look truly black and not scuff, Vantablack is in no way a step in that direction when you consider any of the actual properties of Vantablack. I feel like this article is misleading or whoever wrote it didn’t look into the actual characteristics/ limitations of Vantablack. Separately, I think Vantablack is honestly blacker than anyone would want a stage floor to be. It would look like the floor just wasn’t there, which could be a really cool design choice, but certainly wouldn’t make the stage floor unnoticed.
I agree with Julian my instant response to this was how impractical this would really be for theatrical uses and in the end really not that affordable. I would like however to point out that the paint that they are talking about using samples of is NOT Vantablack it is an actually acrylic matte paint called Black 2.0 that is ALMOST as black and was made by Stuart Sempre in response to the limited access to Vantablack. Black 2.0 behaves much more like paint and is more durable than Vantablack. However, there is still the issue of price. While Black 2.0 is more affordable than Vantablack the price point per gallon comes to about $378 per gallon while a gallon of the good old concentrated Rosco paint is $66 and can be thinned 1:1 yielding in 2 gallons worth of coverage. Meaning that perhaps our current methods may still be the most efficient. It will be interesting to see how this technology develops over the years and if it’s accessibility changes.
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