Today I uploaded pictures from my work at the Paint Shop of North Shore Music Theater onto Flickr, and it reminded me of all the things I learned about backgrounds in general from painting sets for live entertainment performance. There are the obvious crucial realities, like the fact that stages need to be built with weight-bearing lumber and steel to survive weeks of passionate stomping and tap dancing. Like in every business, time and material wasted on a superfluous set piece is a big, expensive pain in the neck. There are lots of things to consider, such as how set design should reflect the content of the story and cater to the taste of the audience. For example, a vampire lair should match character traits of the vampire, but it should also take into consideration whether it is a cartoony children’s villain or a deep and twisted adult villain. There are lots of basic rules in set design, and working at the theater taught me a lot about “building” a good background for any story.
One of the first things that I really learned at North Shore Music Theater (NSMT) was the impact of layering. Layers make every background infinitely more engaging. In any art class you learn about foreground, middle ground, and background, but in theater you construct an entire space according to this fundamental concept. NSMT happens to be unique because it is a theater in the round, so the focus of our sets was always the stage floor, but the same general rules apply. There are the large elements, such as the floor in our case, but usually a series of flats or drops that surround the stage; medium elements that can be mobile, or are suspended from the flies (the space out of view from the audience above the stage); and smaller place holders like props. Within the large backgrounds you have space filling elements such as buildings or trees, then smaller features such as windows or branches, and finally a smattering of details to give the impression of the setting that you are looking at. Here is the primary difference between static art and the background of a theater or film. In a gallery, the viewer has time to appreciate details on a canvas. In a show, the story would have to be pretty lame for you to pay more attention to details of the backdrop than the actors, so instead it is important to provide the ILLUSION of detail. The audience wants to discover subtle things, but you’d be out of a job faster than your head could spin if you spent precious production hours toiling over realistic flaws in brickwork. So, we layer. My experience was in the paint department, but I’m sure similar rules apply to prop and costume production as well. I’ve only worked at one theater so I’ll describe how we did it, so forgive me if other theaters do things differently but the process is probably roughly the same.
First, there is the color palette which is decided by the set designer long before the paint department starts mixing colors. The palette usually consists of base colors, the actual matched colors, and washes. When the color palette is determined and the designer sends in swatches, we start mixing huge buckets of these colors, labeled with descriptive names like “Butterscotch Tan” or “Ruby Slipper Red”. Later, you might get overwhelmed with all of the different shades of blue that you mixed, but hopefully you’ll remember that “Gatorade Blue” goes to the waterfall prop and “Facebook Blue” goes to the library furniture. When we start painting, we begin by laying down 2-3 coats of the base color or a priming color. This is like when you’re priming a canvas, and very seldom do we actually use white. Often we’ll add white to turn a leftover bucket of neutral color into a cool or warm pastel that works as a priming paint. Some materials don’t need primer at all, and then we start painting the solid base color right onto the surface. The base color is lighter than the real color that the object will be and is what will peek out if you miss any spots later. If you’re painting wood grain, it is the tan color that lies under the streaks of grain. It is the first layer that will later appear to be the lighter parts and add depth to any painted object.
Next we paint the object with 2-3 coats of the color that it is meant to be. If you’re painting leaves, this is the mid-tone green that you see when you look at it from a distance. Here is where we start layering color. Obviously if the object is supposed to look flat, you just paint solid coats and perhaps go over it with some highlights and shadows later, but since most objects benefit from some degree of texture, some of the base color should peak out from below as mild highlights. Instead of flat leaves, you now have a two toned leaf that you can easily adjust with variations of brush stroke, paint application techniques like sponging, ragging, marbling, flicking, rolling around on the surface wearing nothing but frayed rope and a pirate flag, etc. The sky is the limit, but you’re creating the illusion of detail with half the work of painstakingly rendering the details of real life. You can spice it up even more by layering textures of different colors together. I used to find this stage a little unnerving at first because things would start to look cartoony or just plain stark, but I later came to accept this stage as just one more step in the process of theater trickery.
The answer to toning down all of these bright colors is to lay down a wash. A wash is watered down paint that ties all of the other layers together. It is usually a watered down version of the main color, but sometimes it is an exciting unexpected color, like pink or green, that seems to have nothing to do with all of the other colors you just laid down but it is actually critical to tying the object in with other parts of the scenery. Before my work in the paint shop, I never knew how many different awesome ways there are to sneak shadowy purples into a color palette.
When all of the major color coats are in place, it’s critical to “help” the backgrounds with exaggerated highlights and shadows. In many cases your backdrop will be flat, and it is the paint’s job to fool the eye where lighting can’t help. Under bright lights and a huge range of viewing distances, the stage is no place to be shy. Pick a light source, be consistent, and pop your work with pastel neutral highlights and dark, neutral shadows.
Last of all is the sealer. Some colors already have a sealant in them, but the majority of the paints we used needed heavy duty protection to withstand the trauma of musical theater acting. Sealer is where the glossy shine comes from when used properly, or where a dull cloudy haze can originate if left under less than perfect conditions. Basically, sealer is a prissy royal pain and needs to dry in a warm room and be evenly distributed for best results. In some cases, tinting sealer with a little paint enriches the final appearance even more, especially if the object needs a little push in one direction or another.
Well, that’s it for now- maybe at some point I’ll upload more tidbits and doodles from the journal I kept during my breaks while we literally sat around waiting for paint to dry.
