Two Gents Part Three: Letters and Ink

Texturing the Columns was probably the smoothest part of the whole set! The cardboard material took the plaster the best! Painting them tho, was a different story! It was rather tricky painting something circular on a horizontal plane. We used sponges to stop the dripping. The inking on them was also very difficult! We all had different ways of doing it. I felt this wasn't going to look very good so I messaged James asking which of the inking he preferred. After telling my team which technique he preferred and how to achieve it, Joe and Flo went about it wrong. This resulted in me having to go over their work and wasting time on them!

The Easy Part

more columns!

it's never-ending!

Mmmm, not sure thats right Flo..

WRONG

Right

That's better!

The time came to see if our saving grace worked.... After PVAing the hell out of the floor, Laura had us pick up all the sheets of ply and shake them vigorously. If everything was done well, the plaster would stick on. That's the theory anyways.... Most of it fell off! By this point we got more floor space so we just laid the whole floor our and plastered the rest of it while doing the patches.

Nice Patchy Floor

Trying to blend in those patches!

Once the floor was all patched up, we moved on to the MASSIVE flats! We started off with texturing all 4 sections roughly. Then I cut out various different shapes out of ply according to the model. When plastered over, this added more dimension and depth in different areas.

Theres the Pangea effect

The flats all painted nice and purty!

Got my inking technique down to a science!

By this point we were on a mad dash to finish! We had to come in on a saturday! A SATURDAY! James even came over to the workshop often to help us as our numbers kept going down. The only things left to do were the hardest parts... POLY CARVING! We did the steel deck carving first.... so quickly that we didn't take any pictures! We were pretty rushed by this point so pictures are scarce.We were given the flats for the steel deck "wall." I then got thin pieces of ply and screwed them onto the wall to create a lip. I then glued layers of polystyrene where the rock work was going to be heavy, the two ends. We then carved it out into rock shapes, scrimmed and plastered over! Same thing was done for the front of the stage rock work, but there was a bit of confusion. We were given more sheets, so we assumed that was for the front...Nope that was for the sides of the steel deck. Apparently when they cut out the side of the ramp, they did two sides... but one of those sides was supposed to be flipped up to create the front wall. We weren't told this until we started screwing in the flats we thought were for the front. 

There were also the dreaded BIRDIE BOXES! This was where I found out SMs don't quite have the same mindset as designers. As George, the lighting designer, wanted there to be birdie lights on the front of the stage, we had to disguise them as boulders along the front of the stage. The SMs were in charge of making these little boxes for the birdie lights to rest on and we were to carve around them. The first mistake the SMs made was making the boxes twice as big as they were supposed to be! After George came in to cut them down, they were still massive! We were on our last 3 days in the workshop and had to do all the polycarving by then. We didn't have enough time to carve enough to disguise these boxes. Lucky Laura stepped in and told us to email James with CC to Sean and Lucy to discuss these boxes. In the end, they were cut, for good reason. It would have thrown the balance of the design off and they would have cut into the ramp quite a bit.

Laura coming to save us!

See, no birdie boxes needed!

I ended up carving most of this heh

To save on time, we scrimmed the Polystyrene and added plaster at the same time! This was HELL!! Even with the added idenden to the plaster, it was a bitch to get the plaster on the wet scrim! Some parts even started to fall out so we added a lot of nails so the scrim wouldn't fall off as we added the plaster. In the end though, the front rock work was very strong and study.

After this it was get in! And the fun of paint calls. That was just pure chaos, so I had no time to take any pictures, but you could definitely see the set coming together in the space. Quite different from seeing in the workshop under harsh lighting.

Two Gents Part Two: Verona's Ruins

My team was getting a bit restless as we were waiting for things to do once James had left. We noticed the smaller ramp had been completed. We decided to just go ahead and start texturing it as we knew we had a lot to do, might as well get it out of the way!

Plaster that Ramp!

How is she doe?

She done

Unfortunately, after our meeting with James, I had fallen ill. I had been sent home from the direction of Roz and missed the following day, but not before finishing the ramp. I came back to 1/4 of the stage floor being textured. It made me a bit nervous as I looked at is as most of it did not look like the samples we had agreed up with James. I wasn't there so I don't really know what happened, but we had no time or enough materials to go over it again, so we started with the steel deck floor.  Because Carolyn, the Director, wanted the columns to move in and out of the stage, masking had to be added so the steel deck floor had to be shortened. This was good news for us as it meant less floor to texture! So we went on ahead laying the steel deck floor with the little room we had! PVAed those babies and slapped on the plaster! While that was drying, me and Flo went ahead and started painting the main floor as it was dry enough to paint... or so we thought....

We aint got the time, just Splash it!

is she good doe?

She's good doe. We made sure!

While getting the basecoat one, Flo and I noticed something.......... The floor was chipping! and not just little pieces but big chucks of the floor were coming off with ease!

What? She's not alright!

Solution(?): Laura told us to let it dry a bit more, then go over the whole floor with a thick layer of PVA. After this we'll see what's stayed and hasn't! What ever happens, we were gonna have replaster bit of the floor anyways. While my team was off doing that, I focused on the steel deck floor as that was definitely dry enough to paint.

We were not too Happy...

She's looking good!

After I did the initial paint job, Charlie did the inking, I trusted her with this as it was the sample James liked the best. During this time though, Charlie started missing some days. The days Charlie would come in, she tried to do her best, but you could tell her heart wasn't in it. This floor was an example of that. The inking she did, was quite sloppy and she left splash marks of black and blue all over the floor where it wasn't supposed to be. She also added yellow into the blending which made the colors go very green. Something was wrong. It started to add tension to our group as Charlie wouldn't message anyone when she wasn't coming in. There were some days were she wouldn't come in as she was hungover. We all like a drink now and then, but to knowingly drink to the point where you're hungover was inexcusable in my eyes. I constantly had to remind myself that it was her illness that caused this, but it was still frustrating to deal with.

Going away from that tangent, we pushed on. We got our columns in!

What's the first think we do with Long Poles? Lie on them!

Giving us Sloth Realness(btw, finished painted sample under Joe)

Two Gents Part One

On October 31st, we were assigned shows for the 2nd lot of productions for the Autumn term. I was placed on "Two Gentlemen of Verona" designed by James Horne, along with Charlie, Joe, Rosalind, and Flora. On that first day, we were given a brief on Jame's design and concept and how to go about realizing his design.  James was very helpful in giving us many reference images and techniques to use.  He told us not to follow the model exactly as it was more to give the feel of what he was going for. He wanted to give us many liberties when creating the sandstone texture.

James original scale model

We set off starting a pricing sheet. I went to Laura to figure out what materials we would need to order and she gave me a comprehensive list.  We then helped James set up for his presentation for the meet and greet. Once the meet and greet was over, we were free to go, ready of the next day

From November 1st onward, we were down at the bay workshop working generally from 9-5. The first week consisted of everyone making sample for each of the shows. For our show, we painted small cuts of OSB with PVA. Once the PVA was dry we were able to start with the plastering to create the texture. We mixed up batches of Bonding coat using the directions Laura gave us. You start with a few inches of water, and start adding the the plaster until it starts to peak. Then using the mixer, you mix up as well as you can. Once you have a porridge-like consistency, you start to add PVA into the mix. You have to add quite a bit to make sure it adheres to the wood. Then you continue to add plaster until you get a nice thick consistency.

Base color on our samples

There's me playing with some paint!

Once we had some samples plastered, once we had a few sample of the plaster I proceeded to paint some samples.  I started off with a basecoat that was as close to the sand color that what we wanted. At first I painted on the emulsion straight onto the texture. When Laura saw me doing this, she suggested I instead water down the base coat heavily and splash it onto the texturing while adding water. This allowed the pigment to go into the cracks and for the color of the plaster to come through, giving the sandstone some warm tones. Once the base color was dry, I experimented with different washes. I knew the colors we were going to use so I started with those. I played with doing the different colors at the same time, which didn't end too well as the colors mixed together.

When you add too many colors, oops!

Once all the washes were added, I went over with a dry brush of the original base color mixed with some white. This made the texture look sandy! Just what we were looking for! 

Sandy Sand Sand

 

Thats a bit better!

I then started to play with the ink seeping in. Don't think I quite achieved it tho.

"Aww you made me ink!"

did the same with the columns

After completing our samples, James came over to the workshop to check them out. He liked the texture and color of my samples, but thought Charlie did the better ink job. He then wanted us to refine our samples a bit more as we wait for our set to be built!

Sample Part two!

Our 2nd set of samples under some light tests

By this point, our team was getting along great, we had people allocated to do certain things, and we were all ready to just jump right into texturing and painting the real set! Little did we know of the difficulties that lied ahead!