Rosco Spectrum: I thought the first time I was asked to paint a full faux metal set was a fluke, a once in a blue moon event that would be fun and challenging. Well I was wrong. I have since been asked to paint four more faux metal sets – making it five total in the past three years.
6 comments:
Sometimes the best looking sets are the ones that use a paint effect to achieve a desired look. This article is one I want to save. I enjoy reading about different ways to visually change the look of the material without adding to the material an additional similar material. In this case, sheets of rolled steel would have been a nice addition onto a plywood base, but also incredibly expensive. Here, the artist was able to create the effect using paint and glaze. One thing that he mentions as his saving grace is that he had time on his hands to experiment and figure out the best solution. Time is not usually the friend of the technical director and sometimes the scenic artist. Here the two teams combined knowledge and skill to create a visually stunning effect. It goes without saying that, in this case, two heads really were better than one and the relationship that the TD and Scenic artist had, no doubt, played a crucial role. The outcome may not have been the same dramatic look had the scenic artist had to do it all alone.
This was an interesting and semi informative article about how silver does not pass for steel. My very first thought about painting a faux steel wall was that you would need the reflective aspect that metal has and often paint is not reflective unless it has that specific property in it, which usually just makes it look incredibly shiny which is not the look that steel typically has. Although this artist’s method seems feasible, I thought it was incredibly dumb that they used steel and decided to paint it with this faux affect. I understand wanting consistency, but if you’re going to have steel anyways, might as well just use REAL STEEL. I think having the layers of paint on MDF would add a sort of depth that metals often give off, and would make for a lighter set, but I also prefer from a design aspect the look of wood, so unless the script specifically calls for steel walls, I don’t think that I would use that.
I disagree with Hannah's point about just using lots real steel if the set already has some steel in in, rather than painting everything to look like steel. I think specifically in the context that this author describes, and looking at the photos that accompany it, it seems that the steel part of the scenery is just the poles and supports, as well as the grated ceiling of the subway car. Using MDO and MDF to build the rest of the set is a much cheaper and lighter option than just creating a giant steel box, so the welded steel frame had to be painted to match everything else. Even if the whole set had been made of steel, would it have been the right aesthetic of steel for the design? What if the designer wanted a rusted decaying wall? What if the shine of the steel used in the welding was too dark of a color for the designer's liking? The steel would have to be painted and treated to look like the aesthetic asked for. Scenic artists do this all the time with wood – we paint wood walls to look like a different kind of wood wall because that is the design look that is desired. That is a part of the ingenuity of theatre – using all the little tricks and skills to create what they need without getting the real thing, and Angelique Powers did a brilliant job at doing just that.
Scenic painting has always been such an interesting topic for me! I've dabbled with it a few times in undergrad, and while I enjoyed myself I don't think i have the skills to do it professionally. Some of the things these scenic artists can do is incredible. I'd never seen a well done metal paint job before. The article reads: "What I loved about this process was the luxury of time to figure out a rolled steel technique that provided a textured surface for the set, which looked marvelous once it was lit. The four subsequent faux steel projects I worked on certainly didn’t afford that luxury to me. Thankfully, I was able to adapt this basic technique in the following faux steel shows as I added more random scumble for one show, tons of spatter for the next, and forced highlights and shadows in the one after that. I hope this technique becomes the starting point for your next faux steel project and that you find clever ways to adapt it into your scenic process." Which seems like a great thing to try.
I love reading articles like this that just give you an inner look at the really behind the scenes of theatre. For a scenic artist this article could provide some valuable tips on how to deal with the tricky paint treatment of steel. For a technical director it’s always a good reminder of what good base materials are and how they interact with the paint treatment to work towards the desired design effect. It’s truly amazing what scenic artists can do. Having the luxury of not making an entire set out of actual steel that the scenic artist can just distress as desired is necessary when you want to make something light enough for just a few stage hands to be able to lift around and when your budget can’t handle actually buying the thing. It’s just like with wood sets. if we didn't have scenic artists who could paint one thing to look like another everything would get so expensive.
This is why I love theatre. Where else can you say that you spent your day making one type of steel look like another. This article exemplifies just what the art of scenic painting is. Its taking technique and paint to create a look that seems so real no one would notice that there is only wood underneath. Though it might seem counterintuitive to paint a steel finish on steel, I think that it was necessary to the overall aesthetic of the show. Often people think that the raw material is enough but everything needs to be finished in some type of way. Like Katie mentioned above, the raw steel may not have looked like the designers design. Scenic painting has the ability to completely transform a piece of scenery into something beautiful. Though I think that some think that painting on a texture or effect is "fake," I would disagree because it, in itself, is part of the theatrical process and I have always found it to give the set that extra "wow factor" that did not exist prior.
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