Theater | Pittsburgh | Pittsburgh City Paper: I take drawings from the designer and make them into scenery. Carpenters build pieces — walls, floorboards, doors, furnishings. Then I use paint and other materials to make them look like something other than what they are.
5 comments:
I love scenic painting. It’s such an amazing way to turn something ordinary, like a sheet of Masonite, into a garden, a fence, a brick wall, really anything you want, with paint and a few other tools. I’ve just begun the paints unit in stagecraft and I really love it. It’s calming while also creatively using your mind. There’s even more involved when you’re the scenic artist. I always forget how much research goes into learning how to make things look aged or a texture other than painted. I can understand how it takes years of practice, experience, and learning to become a really good scenic artist. I’ve recently been thinking about scenic painting and how much I enjoy it. I know there are jobs in theaters, such as the Pittsburgh Public Theater, but I’m also curious what other types of jobs you can do with a scenic painting background. Initially, I thought I would be a painter and study visual arts, but I fell in love with theater along the way. Honestly, scenic painting seems like a perfect way of combining both disciplines.
I think scenic painting is a fascinating department of theater and one that perhaps does not get as much credit as it deserves. I worked on the paint crew for a couple shows last year and I was amazed by how many steps there are between getting the material and turning it into something that can be presented on stage. A lot of the time, the sets are painted as though they are new, and then, slowly, the painters have to add elements of wear and tear so that, for example, a house will look lived in or the ground will looked like it has been walked on. While the scenic designer is instrumental in the overall look of the set and in telling the painters what colors they would like and such, the scenic painter is ultimately in charge of executing perhaps the most visible technical element of a production. This is an immensely difficult job and one that probably deserves a little more credit in the theater world.
I love painting for fun and I think that this is a really cool article because scenic painters are not credited enough for the amount of work they put in. I think that it is a super tough job and a lot of work goes into making something look so absolutely different and also the exact thing a designer wants. I've done some scenic painting before and for one show we had to paint two giant portraits of the main character. I was only the assistant but I watched one of my friend spend hours and hours on this one piece that was on stage for about ten minutes. Granted, it looked amazing, but she did not get as much recognition as I felt she deserved for all her work. Scenic artists have to have a large arsenal of tools and tricks to achieve the looks they need and I am always fascinated by their work, especially when I can't tell what the original material is.
It is always interesting to hear about other people’s creative processes and how they ended up where they are now. I agree with everything that Ms. Blackwood says in this interview, and it is very interesting, even though I likely will not end up becoming a scenic painter, to see how she ended up where she did, and why she does what she does. Painting is a very interesting part of theatre to me, because it is both very broad, but at the same time, it is very detail oriented. As the audience is usually at least forty feet away from the painted object, so small mistakes go unnoticed, but they might also notice if certain details are not present at all. It is very true that the audience has no clue how much work actually goes into making a show happen, whether that is paints or any other discipline of theatre.
Scenic painting was one of my favorite aspects of doing theater at my high school. One day, the head of our drama department came back from a scenic paint workshop out of town and bought a ton of new materials for us to play with. He taught us to do basic brick treatments and showed us texturing and distressing techniques. Sets are such unique canvases to paint on because there is a balance between realism and fantasy that occurs on stage. Paint something too true to its real life counterpart and it risks getting details washed out on stage with the lights and action. On the other hand, getting identifiable colors slightly wrong or pushing too far into the realm fantasy can make it too apparent that we are looking at a painted set. The beauty of scenic paint-- aside from the paint work itself-- is that we believe what we see and all the ways it has lived through the world of the play.
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