Garson Hampfield, Crossword Inker November 9, 2008

Man, some of the things this (fictional) guy says really hit home in terms of the ever-growing capacity to mechanize the scenic industry. Scenic artists all tell ourselves that drops printed large-scale can’t come close to the results acheived by extremely highly trained people working in a way that’s been passed down for hundreds of years. Luckily, this is still mostly true, but those robots are getting better all the time.

I liked this so much, I’m half-tempted to write a script paralleling this one about my job:

http://www.xwordinfo.com/Hampfield.aspx

The cartoon was made by Michael A. Charles, whose website is found here. He seems like a fairly wonderful person.

Pouring off while mixing August 22, 2008

This one’s another of those so-obvious practices that took a while to get through to my brain. My first day at Old-School Scenic, I was working with a lovely woman named K. We spent most of the morning mixing a bunch of colors – a sort of nerve-wracking activity on my first-ever day of union work, but it seemed to go pretty well. My buddy M. (another apprentice) said that he kept looking across the shop floor and getting nervous on my behalf.

For the most-of-the-people-I-know who don’t do this for a living, mixing colors is a really finicky activity that takes a lot of practice. It’s about stored-up knowledge from years of getting colors wrong: if the vibrant magenta you’re mixing is a little too vibrant and a little too light in value, you can pop in some raw umber (a green-tinged brown) to get the shade you want. Picky, picky knowledge. And easy and expensive to get wrong, but really satisfying to get right.

For the painters I love, then: lots of times when you’re mixing a color, you find yourself getting mighty close and then needed to lighten it a little, right? Those colorants can really take the value down while you’re trying to find your hue. As you’re adding white, instead of just dumping the white straight into the color you’ve been working on, pour some of the mix off first. This way, if you put too much white into the whole thing, you can pour in some of your old mix (the stuff you’ve just poured off) to bring it back to exactly what you were looking for.

K. kept reminding me, gently, to pour off some of the mix before I added more white, especially in circumstances where it seemed like I was having to add much more white than I’d thought I would. This all, of course, traces back to the idea that if you’re trying to get a pastel, you oughtta start with the white and mix in the color, rather than vice versa. No guilt here, though: the colors I was trying to rock were pretty far from pastel.

Union puzzles: Industrials August 13, 2008

Now that I’m finally working on some union gigs, a crazy amount of stuff has changed. One of the biggest new things is the presence of “industrials,” who are lovely people whose job it is to keep everything in the shop all stocked-up and moving smoothly. Industrials are creating a lot of mysteries already in my mind: it’s such a super-specialized set of tasks that I have no clue how anyone would ever find out the job existed in the first place. They’re members of the same local as I am now, but I don’t know if they test or just apply or have to know someone special or what.

On the union site, a few industrials have postings in the “member gallery” section that has samples of people’s work. One lady wrote out her job’s tasks as follows:

§ Responsible for shop-area set-up and preparation for Scenic Artists’ daily work

§ Maintaining inventory of shop and multiple NYC locations’ on-site supplies

§ Research – locating vendors, materials, items for purchase, pricing and availability

§ Purchasing/Invoicing – monitoring individual budget lines, monitoring of labor estimates per assignment, purchase orders, bill coding, petty cash

§ Payroll: daily submissions of coded Labor Reports to accounting; weekly submission of time cards for Scenic Department; submission of Monthly Labor Report to USA Local 829 Union for Annuity and Pension/Welfare employer contribution monitoring.

I’m not sure how much of this is sometimes/usually the job of the charge artist, but from what I’ve experienced, the industrials run around the shop cleaning things and prepping things and answering a million questions all day long. They’ve got the keys to the magic storeroom full of prizes, and seem to be instantly there the second you look confused about something. These people know where things are.

Pulling staples August 13, 2008

Form follows function

You have to be squatting around down on the floor either way, but pulling staples from a drop would be pretty nice with a guy like this, right? It’s even got a magnet in the end, so now there are no excuses. There’s gotta be some way to attach one to a pole…

Unionizing July 23, 2008

Also, I almost forgot to say that I finally took my union pledge last week and am now an honest-to-God union member. IATSE Local USA 829 is the place to find scenic artists and designers.

The drawback is that I have had this song in my head for a week straight.

The advantages include better pay, benefits, more reasonable working hours, a safety officer who seems to know just about everything, and the ability to work for Broadway, television, and movies. Oh, and the classes that come along with the apprenticeship program look to be nigh-on wonderful. “Stained Glass for Television?” Yes, please.

OMG Makeover!! July 23, 2008

I just got back (okay, like a week and a half ago) from St. Michael’s Playhouse up in Winooski, Vermont. They had me in to charge a show called Moonlight and Magnolias, but I ended up staying a wee bit longer to cover for the next painter who was arriving a little later. After some serious madness toward the end of the Moonlight build involving six cumulative hours of sleep over four consecutive nights, this was the state of the shop:

This was also the state of my mind at that moment.

But I had warned John Devlin, the production manager, that I was gonna remake the shop in my own image, and by God, we got it done. I had a whole magical day wherein any number of beautiful shop intern types asked me over and over what they could make next. They made a few shelves, a backboard for the mixing table, and Joe Toole (the shop supervisor) made a brand new cabinet to hold brushes and markers. We got rid of a remarkable amount of wicked-smelling rotten paint, and sealed and labeled everything we could salvage.

Check out this nonsense! How pretty is that?!? Na NA na NAH!

A big happy thank-you, therefore, to Emily and Laura and Maria and Joe and Amanda and Evan and Libby and Dawn. You all win everything. The St. Michael’s kids are gonna love you for this.

Glass logs December 20, 2007

Sometimes people make up their minds in bizarro directions. A designer wanted icy firepits (don’t think too hard about that one and you’ll be fine), and we went back and forth quite a bit on the logs that would form the base. We knew the top was going to be clear and lit from below, and we were sitting pretty on a lot of quartered firewood and a few full birch trees. We just didn’t know which shape and color to let them end up. White? A little sparkly? Straight-up logness?

Word finally came back: clear logs. Oh. Clear.

Now, I can make things a lot of different colors for you. The one thing I can’t turn something is “clear.”

The shop (Gest Scenic Creations) got in some plexglass rod and Kyle Dixon set a hot glue gun to figuring out how to make the stuff look like trees. Kyle’s crazy good, too. His big project at the moment is the scenic design of Growing Up 70′s on Off-Broadway. I wish I had some pictures of these suckers when they were all lit up.

And no matter how hard I campaigned, they wouldn’t let me take one home.

Elmer Gantry – Podium woodgrain November 11, 2007

I worked for three and a half weeks as a co-charge (with the ridiculous and fun Shana Siegel) on the world premiere of the opera Elmer Gantry. It’s opening this week in Nashville, though we painted it at Montclair State University in New Jersey.

Here’s one of the podiums we painted when the scene shop was enlisted to make a few of the props. Jeff Kurtze built the podium beautifully and I felt a little stranded with just chip brushes and a sketchy little children’s art brush from Target that happened to be in my bag. Though I was pretty sure the woodgraining would be pretty suspect, I think it turned out okay, considering.

This also went through the trademarked “Nausea Phase” of any work that’s going to turn out okay, where you’re pretty sure that it’s going to be the worst thing you’ve ever made.

 

 

 

New obvious tools September 19, 2007

Me, on the phone: “Hey, I just wondered if you wanted me to do something about the interior corners on these walls. I remember you said something about it, but I can’t for the life of me remember…. Oh. Wait. The painter’s caulk. Right. (Pause.) I just completely answered my own question, didn’t I?”

J: “Ha. Yep.”

Me: “Well, I’m glad I brought you here for this.”

Moral of the story: How have I never used this before?

The Piper, New York Musical Theatre Festival – Making new look old September 17, 2007

 

Sometimes a scenic gets to paint big, complicated, satisfying drops. Other times, a scenic makes new stuff look like crappy old stuff. My friend Becca called me about painting a show she was stage managing, and I was happy to help out. It was three days of aging things and trying to stay out of the way of the carpenters (steelworkers?) building the Chicago set for Altar Boyz.

Anna Louizos’s design for The Piper had to be simple enough to be changed out for the Festival’s repertory format, so the gist of the design was conveyed by dead-hung windows and furniture. The play takes place in a Boston pub, and she wanted the stools, tables, and benches to look antique and tobacco-stained. I love the thought process that has to go into aging and distressing furniture – one ends up picturing a generation of drunk guys tossing benches around the room.

In the end, we used five steps:

1. Beat the crap out of the wood.

I used a handheld grinder, a length of chain (the guys in the shop really dug watching that part of the process), a screwdriver, and a hammer and chisel. At first, I think I started in with too many scratches toward the middle of a surface – remember that it’s the edges that will really get hurt.

2. “Dye” the bruised areas.

On the new pine we used, the chipped and scratched areas took a (very thin) paint much more strongly than the rest of the surface. The coat also served to add a little dimension to the general wood’s coloring. I used a thin enough coat, though, that the grain definitely still stood out. We didn’t have much time, so I wanted to work with the wood and preserve the natural grain we had.

3. Glaze with topcoat color.

We used a burnt-sienna/yellow mix, with just a touch of black mixed in to kill the brightness. Worked it into some water-based polyurethane along with a little fireproofing, and then brushed it over everything. Follow The Grain!

4. Sand down the areas that would show the most wear.

Edges. Footrests on stools. Corners of table legs. This takes out the color again and really makes the more finished areas pop.

5. Blacken the most-touched and least-cleaned parts.

Again, picturing hundreds of people and their dirty hands. Paint where you’d pick it up! Paint near the floor! I just used a chip brush with some mildly thinned black paint, and a rag. Let us never forget the power of a rag.

Et voila!: