19 October 2019 Still Saturday?

[scenicdesign71]

...technically not, but it's still Saturday to me.  I got home an hour ago from an 18-hour work call painting a mural for a new play at Rattlestick that's being produced by an old friend of mine.

I should have taken some process pics, but I'm sure there will at least be some photos taken of the finished result, at some point.

Murals seem to be my thing this year.  This one was a painterly picture-postcard view of the Arizona desert, with the Phoenix skyline in the middleground, dwarfed by the distant mountains -- essentially a good old-fashioned scenic backdrop, designed by a talented young fellow-NYU alumna, and painted directly onto the gnarly, patchy, age-textured back wall of the stage.

...And then, once it was all pretty and picturesque, attacked with thick, dirty glazes and a sponge-roller to make the image look heavily weathered and faded.

...Followed, once all that was dry, by a whole separate, superimposed layer of frantic graffiti-esque doodling in invisible UV paint -- meant (per the designer) to suggest an Adderall trip, with lots of sharply zigzagging lines, a sky filled with hundreds of what might be obsessive tally-marks ticking off god only knows what, and huge scribbled eyeball-like shapes wallpapering every available inch of the landscape below.

The fun with this kind of UV painting is that, because it's invisible except under blacklight, you have to paint it that way: with all the lights off except the blacklight source.  So it feels like a party, even when you're alone onstage, up a ladder, quietly painting phosphorescent squiggles while listening to a podcast at 3 in the morning.

Last time I worked with this stuff (alongside a crew of scenics painting my design for a summer-stock Tommy), the ambience was further enhanced by glowing G&T's to keep things festive.  But that was fifteen years ago.  Tonight, starting the blacklight (final) phase of this mural around midnight, a highball would've just made me sleepy.

Also, I learned that the "salt" in my beard is now pure-enough white to basically make my whole chin glow under blacklight.