Monday, July 27, 2009

My new love...

Mark Ryden

Oh. My. God.

http://www.markryden.com/index.html

Happy Sigh.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

The Makings of a Vermont Tech Week

I have come to realize that as a theatre person, I have found myself getting into these crazy habits. Crazy tendencies, and the slight beginnings of a potentially Obsessive Compulsive Disorder--for my paint kitchen.

Yes, my paint kitchen. (See the OCD kicking in?)

I say my partially because I am the only one who has any form of paint in my staff title. I also say my because I put it to some order and figured out the local of everything in this area. I say my because I am the only one that cleans the space and feels the need for it to be kept orderly. Specifically because it's so tiny here.

Unfortunately with all this in mind, I am the only one that cares about the situation of this area. The designer who is the only other one who mixes any kind of color or is in there for remotely as long as I am.

With this being said, I have come into the shop early all week to work on the paintings that are on the walls, and to re-clean, re-organize, and re-wash buckets, brushes and whatever else the designer has laid his hands on. So, the other day, a few days before we got into tech, I took some pictures after I newly re-cleaned my itty-bitty paint kitchen.


It's not much, but I have to keep it clean or else its impossible to try to do anything in it. (It's virtually impossible to try to do anything in it when it's clean!)

By the end of day the same day I took this picture:


Le sigh. The other side is equally as messy. Everyday this is what I go through. It drives me crazy, but what's a girl to do. Poor Samsung and Mittens get to listen to me complain about it day in and day out. Bless them.

I decided that tracing the images from a projector of these interesting Indian inspired erotica, and then pouncing them out on the walls would be the easiest method of transferring these 8' images onto the wallpaper walls. Below is the MonkeyMan ripping open his chest. He lives on the far SR wall.



The designer, or rather, the Director wanted the images to be translucent, so to make it look like they are coming from within the walls. A pretty cool though, a choice to say the least. But it made it a lot easier and quicker to paint with this all in mind. So, this is it mid process:



Load-in was...interesting. And terrifying, but all in all, all the walls got loaded in. It looks pretty snazzy. This is from yesterday before we did a lot of the paint notes. So here is that:



Until next time....

Friday, July 17, 2009

Finishing up everything related to mega portraits

I felt the need to finish up/add these few things that I am fairly satisfied with given the time I had to work on them.

And so we begin!

Painting elevation for the General Store scene for "Merton of the Movies".

Finished product. It's 6' wide and 9' tall. Basically did it in one day...not too shabby. It obviously needs to be edited before it goes into the portfolio. Samsung got in the way doing a wavey thing with her hands.

These are the infamous painting elevations for the two huge mega portraits: The ''Rosacea Lady" was a pieced together elevation and the woman was a famous actress in the 20's. The designer didin't want the font, so it was fun to try to figure out how to do all of this.

The designer is a fanatic of Photoshop. Sometimes it works for him, sometimes it doesn't. This was a black and white image that he found that he colorized on the famous photoshop. This one was a little easier to work from.

And I give you, THE FINAL RESULT!

I'm pretty happy with them if I do say so myself.

Creating the Garden of Eden

Well for starters, I want to appolosize on the quality of these pictures--sorta. I know they aren't color perfect, but I don't have photoshop yet, and with the new laptop and everything, I'm still trying to figure everything out (how to size the images as well) and all that good stuff. But here is the jist of everything to a certain degree!

We finished the walls today! Yayayayay!
Well...the flowers we finished, now it's onto naked people!

Here are the elevations the designer gave me (like I said, color is off in these pictures!)

These are the SR/Centre walls

These are the SL walls.

Like the naked random Indian Erotica that he chose? I'm looking forward to painting that (and by looking forward, I mean I don't know how I feel about it quite yet.)

This is Greg, but I call him Mittens for reasons I will delve into another time. He is one of the carpentry interns and I somehow partially suckered him into helping me stencil.

When I took the picture, I told him to smile and this is what he did
............................hehehe, he's very angsty.
I'm pretty sure he feels like stenciling flowers with girls is damaging to his straight masculinity.
I think he secretly likes it, he just doesn't want to admit it.

This is my partner in crime, Sam, but I call her Samsung. She is the other carpentry intern here.
She's the one that's been helping me do all this stenciling. She has a little more optimistic view about days upon days of stenciling then Mittens does--or at least this is what this picture tells me.

FINISHED WALLS!!!! YAY! They are so pretty! They make me happier then they really should, but they are so purdy!

Detail! Detail! Detail!

Tonight we will be projecting the wonderful entourage of naked Indian erotica and pouncing them onto the walls to prep them to be painted tomorrow. The designer comes back after being away for a week so his arrival makes me a little anxious because I want everything to go well. I've sent him process shots during the week and it's been good feedback, but I still worry.

Anyways, more to come. I'm hoping to do a blog about the whole stenciling process, and to keep photo documenting this whole stenciling/show painting thing some more. Not too much longer now! 6 more days until my contract is O-V-E-R!!

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Some wall updates!!

Here is some stuff as promised:

The walls are going good. This is the set of "The Hallow", a murder mystery drama written by Agatha Christie. They need to be done by tomorrow night. We (and by we I mean me and pretty much one other person, up to 4, but generally 2 people only) have been working non-stop on these for like 14 hour days (plus the damn run crew we have to do). Anyways....traditionally it is supposed to be set in a manor, a rich local somewhere in England, but the designer went off on the deep end, and this is his twist on things a bit.

This is the extremely pixelated "painting elevation" that the designer gave me and basically said "Good luck making a stencil!"


Heh heh heh heh......4 days later, I won, and this sample came from my angsty hands:


Eat your heart out designer! He really liked it and everyone else did, now just to transfer it onto these 16' monstrosities.

This is the second step of the first process, or the 1st step of the stenciling on the walls: the leaves. Conveniently (or not, depending on how you look at it), the designer didn't want it to be wallpaper, he wanted it to "Look like a meadow"

.........................k?

So, here we go!

This is step 2: a Leaf Stencil. It's taken us like 2 1/2 days to get this step on all the walls--taken so long and the poor stencil is so fah-cocked from the usage!

Step 3: The base of the flowers. While the leaf stencil was going on I started the flower one...almost finished, hopefully will be done by tomorrow morning! There are a lot of them, and I look like I have killed the Easter bunny with all these pastel colors on my hands, clothes, etc.

From a distance...it's getting there!

Close-up of the flower detail. Only 2 more steps to go! Highlight Stencil, & Lowlight Stencil. We started them today, they are looking AWESOME. It's making it worth staying here the extra 2 weeks during my "2 Weeks Notice" time.

It's going to be a good portfolio piece.

More to come, like painters elevations and the finishes of those huge portraits from before. On a side note about those: they are in the papers EVERYWHERE here---apparently old people really dig them and think they are good! Yay!

Monday, July 13, 2009

Hello 1,100 square feet of doom!!!

So this is the reason why I decided to stick around and give 2 weeks notice instead of bailing on these hippies up here:

I give you, ridiculiously terrifying wallpaper walls!



Part 1 of a 5 phase, 4 part stencil. Here's some more:



These walls are 16' tall. They sewed strips of muslin together and they attached it to the walls. I told them I needed to starch it--they didn't think it was necessary. It started to pucker, they learned. Oh well, silly Hippies.

I'll try to get the painters elevation up as well as the sample I had to do for what the final product is going to be. In the end it's going to be this flowery/leaf thing...it's pretty ugly and terrifying.

Oh, and please notice the circa 1970 ghetto scaffolding that is jolly rigged together and the pieces of wood I have to work on. Yes, this is "fun". And yes, I have almost passed out from the fear of the height. It's not so bueno my friends.

Not so bueno at all.

First Casualty of the Season

So, the sound booth at our theatre is up in the rafters---quite literally.

Unfortunately the first casualty was M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E's relative.

The other day the sound intern was running the sound check as the whole pre-show thing. Next thing I know I hear "Holy Crap!" and hear him scurrying down the ladder into the theatre. Apparently before the Sound Designer left, he asked said intern to clean out the booth because it "smelt like death". They thought that it was just the smell of the garbage, which they emptied, but the smell didn't go away. When the sound intern went to go plug in his laptop that night, this is what he found:



Poor thing never stood a chance. Needless to say it made the rehearsal report for the evening and this picture was shortly attached and sent out to the company for all to see.

Ahh the highlights of theatre!

I'm gonna be shitting berries like a bird for weeks

When I was a kid, we had bushes upon bushes of these blackcap berries that I used to pick during the summer and would eat handfulls and handfulls of berries a day growing up. Conveniently up here in Vermont there are MORE bushes and bushes of these berries so I am picking them religiously and including them in EVERYTHING I can.

Here is said wonderful berries:


Needless to say since I am consuming so many cupfulls of these a day I'll be shitting berries like a bird for weeks: hence the title.

Mega Portraits

So these pictures are a little old, but I took some process shots of these fairly sweet portraits I had to do for the show that is open right now, which is "Merton of the Movies". I'll try to get the paint elevation up soon as well as the final product, but for now, here's what I got:



And 1: the beginnings



And 2: the middles



And 3: and still some more work.

I'll try to get the final images up soon as well as the painting elevations.
For the record, these are 6' wide and 9' tall, on luan with gaft tape seams. Oh yah, gotta love theatre!

Long Overdue

So, I'm going to take this slowly, and do a bunch of small updates. I got a new camera, so I am going to try to start to include some pictures here....


This would be a tree. A really old tree that is a resident outside of the house I am staying in. It's old, it's cool. I kinda dig the tree, not gonna lie.

In other news....

On Thursday, I handed in my 2 weeks notice to this place, informing them that I recently found out that my Grandmother isn't doing too well, and that I wanted to be able to be with her and that I need to do medical related things for Juilliard. I didn't get into how miserable I am here, how they lie in their contracts and don't stick to them, and break a ton of laws about labor and days working and working conditions, etc. I just left it at that.

Granted, they probably weren't too happy about it, they seemed to be understanding about it, and no one has treated me and differently thus far. It could be a lot worse I suppose.

This is all just skimming the surface of what has happened between blog postings, but I digress, and move onto another fun post!