process continued

I hope you enjoyed the small video my friend Johnny Stranger made!
It has been a while since the last post!  I up-ed the deadline for the drop to be finished so that I could get ready for the semester- lots of meetings, organizing, planning and the like- I am SO excited to be teaching!  I am hoping that this site can be a resource for my students.  In prep for teaching Scene Painting I have realized that there are not a ton of sites on the subject, with how-to's and such.  I came across a terrific one here only to find out that they have stopped publishing. :(

I believe that I left off with MK and I starching the drop.  It dried GREAT!  No buckling, no scalloping, meaning that we did not get it too tight.  Next step cartooning.

I placed the prints I had made on cardboard and covered them in acetate.  These are the paint elevations- what a designer hands over to the scenic in order to produce the work.  Using a sharpie and a ruler/t-square, MK drew a one inch grid over top of the elevation.  This grid corresponds with the 1 foot grid we laid on the starched drops using a snap line.  Once the grid is complete on both we begin cartooning- transferring the design from the paint elevation to the drops one box at a time.

To cartoon you use a bamboo stick with hard vine charcoal placed in the end of the stick.  Traditionally you would go back over the lines in something more permanent like Sharpie or a water based paint- although when using permanent marker you don't want it to show through the  paint of the design. The stick is able to hold the vine charcoal if you split the stick a few times and then put a rubber band around the end.  Clearly, I need to get a picture of this!

The tricky part - when cartooning a drawing/ design one is tempted to draw a line that corresponds with the one on the paint el - in this design, which was a linocut to begin with - the lines are thick and one line, the width of your vine charcoal is not going to convey the thickness of the line.  So you you need to draw "both sides of the line".  This is where you begin to understand that when you scale something up, you must take into consideration - proportion- of the whole design-when cartooning.  Rule of thumb- don't begin to paint until the whole drop is cartooned.

There was a lot of cartooning to do!

 I left the faces until the end.  In the original drawing I had an interaction between everyone - it got a bit distorted with the print- because I lost some of the detail in the cutting.  I swept from left to right while painting the faces on the center drop-making sure that everyone had a "focus" and  that the relationships displayed in the poem/lyrics surfaced visually in the drop. For example-Queenie is facing away from Burrs, it is she who is looking for something "new".Queenie's gaze is to Mr. Black-"new mysterious man" (man in tux in foreground)- , Burrs gaze is to Mr. Black-"who the heck is he?" and Mr. Black's gaze is to Queenie "wow!  who is that!".  A great art historical reference to this is Paul Cadmus' painting "A Night in Bologna" , Cadmus guides your eye through the gaze of his subjects.

Oh!  and I left hands until the end too.  I have a really hard time with hands unless I have a model in front of me.  I can get the basic shape as a whole - as soon as I break it down to capture the fingers and thumb I have a tendency to get lost.  There is a huge distortion in proportion (LOL!) throughout the design and since it is consistent it holds together. 

The completed drops- moving left to right-

So that was roughly the process for this project-
I begin teaching Scenic Painting this Friday- first class-VERY EXCITED AM I!!!!
I will be posting more about the class and the projects we will be working on.
If you have any questions, suggestions I would love to hear them!
Thank you for reading!
peace,
slee