4 April 2021

[scenicdesign71]

Sharing work pics is always a dicey matter, but I can't resist:

(Still, do me a solid and DON'T COPY OR POST THESE anywhere.  And, since bots will be bots, I'm not gonna say what production these are from).

The last few weeks, and this past week in particular, have been unusually relaxing and enjoyable for me as I've been working on one of those plum assignments that comes up now and then (and which my boss, bless her, seems increasingly willing to entrust to me).  This time, it was a velvet painting (!) executed in triplicate (!!) over the course of about four days (not including the research and development of the image itself, which I'd spearheaded over the preceding couple of weeks -- off and on, in between other projects -- with input and feedback from the production designer, to arrive at the final composition).  Three identical copies were required because this painting is meant to be destroyed on-camera (!!!), and if more than one "take" ends up being necessary you want to have extras for backup.

As I may have explained elsewhere, "fake" paintings (as opposed to real ones bought or rented from the owner or artist) on stage or film sets are often simply color-printed on canvas using a large-format inkjet printer; touched up with acrylics as needed; given a bit of impasto texture with a thick clear-acrylic gel medium; and then varnished (with or without a slight yellow or umber tint to make them appear aged) and framed.  In a case like this, where multiples are needed, printing would seem an especially handy solution.  But the designer and director felt that the classic high-contrast "velvet Elvis" style was an important element here, and a printing test of my final concept rendering onto black velour turned out so dismally that there was no choice but to hand-paint them all.

Though color and gradient were pretty much a disaster with the printing, we were able to print just my initial line-drawing onto the velour in opaque blue-grey ink, which saved me some time establishing an identical basis for all three paintings without having to painstakingly transfer the sketch onto each one.  But that still left the real meat of the painting to be done by hand, step by step for each painting in turn -- with all three in front of me at once, so that I could repeat each part of the process literally brushstroke by brushstroke, assembly-line style.

Velour is a tricky surface for painting, and I'm sure I only scratched the surface in terms of figuring out its eccentricities.  The smoky orange surround -- an idea to which the designer had become enthusiastically attached during our development process -- promised to be a particular challenge on this substrate; so I actually ended up using orange and yellow spraypaint, in spite of my own slight apprehensiveness about the control required to reproduce its aerosol effects three times with enough precision to appear identical.  (Alas, one of these days I'll get an airbrush and learn how to use it).  Frisket helped, not only to mask out the figure while spraying, but also to give the smoke some consistent shape between the three iterations.  And again, just as with the brushwork, jumping methodically from one painting to the next after each and every stroke of the spray-can helped to ensure a uniform result.

As always, I still have plenty of nits to pick with the finished product; I'd love to tweak for days, but, even setting aside production deadlines, the nature of this medium makes it sharply inhospitable to overwork: erasures are impossible on velvet, and its absorbency means that overpainting will quickly clog the nap and become an ugly mess.  (I fortunately managed to learn these elementary lessons through trial and error on several preliminary studies a week or two ago using cutoff remnants of the same velour; so by the time I started the final paintings, I had some basic understanding of what I was facing).

But overall, I'm very pleased with how these turned out, and they've garnered compliments all around (including, most importantly, from the designer, whose final assessment was, and I quote: "WOW... beyond gorgeous!"  More-importantly still, I'm told that the director -- who had first suggested the painting's subject -- loved them, too).  I'll be kinda sorry to see them get torched next week, though it should make for a very dramatic scene!

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[KathyB]

I had sesame chicken with brown rice for Easter lunch. Delicious, and the restaurant was quite busy when I entered, with two people waiting for orders, one on the phone and one on hold. It took about five minutes before I could place my order. It's been a lovely day for waiting outside the restaurant for my food--about 75°F with no wind and bright sunshine. I have the window in my home office open. Although I should be doing laundry, I have an enormous urge to lay down and take a nap.

[DiveMilw]

Belated - Those paintings are fabulous.  To make three virtually identical pieces on a flat surface would be extremely difficult.  To do it on velvet is a virtuoso feat!  Congratulations!!!

[scenicdesign71]

Thank you, Tom!  It was a really fun project, though I have to say, the challenge of making them identical while working with an unfamiliar -- and itself challenging -- material was daunting.

In the end, I'm pleased to say that my few after-the-fact nitpicks are basically not related to either of those two issues: in terms of painting on velour specifically, it may not look like the work of a lifelong master of the medium, but it doesn't look like that of a completely talent-free dabbler either.  And even more gratifyingly, having met that challenge satisfactorily, I do think they meet the other one -- that of appearing identical -- quite well.

If anyone's interested, I might come back here and blather a bit more about the process, and about the strengths and weaknesses of the final result.  Broadly speaking, the project's success depended upon planning and simplicity, and while some of the specific choices were only half-conscious on my part, in retrospect I think the whole process breaks down -- with satisfying clarity, as such things go -- into a concise series of fairly cut-and-dried steps.  (It's for exactly that reason that I think it might be kinda fun to try and get it down in words.  Not right now, though... right now, it's 11pm!!! and I have to be up at 5am.  Maybe this weekend?).