Guild of Scenic Artists: It’s always a special day when you have enough budget to spring for some of the colors designed for theatrical use. I’ve painted so many shows with a budget that required me to rely heavily on the Oops paint selection at a couple of different paint stores.
I came up through the high realism era of Chicago theatre when the industry was starting its recovery from the 2008 recession. Most of the venues are so intimate that the scenic design often bordered on being immersive. The budget was very low so I had to pinch and scrape where I could.
3 comments:
I’m not a painter, but it is fascinating to me all of the aspects that can go into other departments and their decisions about how to spend money on a production. If I need to paint something, my first idea would be to go to the home center and buy the cheapest can of paint I can find in the color that I need and roll it onto the wall. There's a reason I’m not a scenic painter. I think that on first glance I wouldn’t understand why using a higher quality paint like Rosco Off Broadway would be important, because I do not have the experience of hours and hours of mixing paint and truly understanding how the higher quality pigments and binders actually make a difference to how the paint is applied and reads on stage. On stage we are trying to create worlds that are spectacular and larger than-life, and the first thing we see is the paint. Of course the scenic artist should spec a paint with better pigment, just like I would spec a light with better LED emitters.
Painting is a key feature of theatrical scenery as we continuously attempt to create reality from scraps. I didn't have the opportunity to use paints as nice as Rosco Off Broadway paint until getting to college and it has greatly boosted my opinion of the paint. When working on a budget I never fathomed the time it might save to buy more pigmented paint that is specifically designed for what it is being applied to. This article also mentions the idea of color mixing and using a higher quality paint to achieve the exact result required for the production. Using the Rosco Scenic Sets would be a great opportunity to experiment with the brand and determine if making the switch would be the correct move for any specific paint shop. Overall this article gives some great tips on transferring over to Rosco paints in hopes of leveling up overall production quality for the stage.
In highschool theatre I only ever used house paint for our sets and even to paint our stage. It never really looked the best and if we wanted something especially colorful it wasn’t great. Then coming to CMU and having paints my first semester I learned about the Rosco off broadway, and the broadway scenic paints. With these paints I had to mix and color match and to be honest every time I used them they were so vibrant and had a great consistency. I painted something with the paints for fun and I was very surprised at the quality of the paint since it dried so evenly and was very bright. I feel like on stage it is very important for colors to dry evenly, remain bright, and be good quality because that’s what makes the show look high quality. I’ve actually turned my old school onto Rosco scenic paint recently.
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