Introduction to Scenic Painting

Book suggestions.
Tools used in the trade.
Suggestions for brushes.
Letter Grade for this class.

Scenic Painting is an art, a craft, it communicates about the show, it expresses feelings, it is collaborative, and it is successful if it does all those things without overwhelming the show.

Left, a typical design for a Theatrical Scene Shop from "Scene Design and Stage Lighting" by W. Oren Parker, R. Craig Wolfe, and Dick Block.
Right, a Cross Section of the New Paris Opera House from "The Simon and Schuster Book of the Opera"

Left, a paint elevation for "Romantic Comedy," right the completed set.

Top a paper model for the first act for Doug Schmidt's "Porgy and Bess," bottom. the set on stage at The Radio City Music Hall.

A backdrop for the Grateful Dead and a newspaper clipping of Jerry garcia in front of it in a show at U.C.Berkeley.

Left, sound scrims for Metallica at a Day on the Green at the Oakland Colliseum
Right, a detail of a backdrop painted to look like drapery for the San Francisco Opera.

Left, painted drops for Industrial Theater, in this case a Sun Microsystems Conference.
Painted small logo for a live broadcast of The NFL Today. The way we used to do things before electronic logos.

The Los Angeles Colisseum with a temporary stage installed and the stands painted and decorated for the 1984 Olympic Games.

Left, an example of painted woodgrain from "Flubber." Right, Stanford University dressed as Rutland University for "Flubber."

Left, this is not an actual wall, it is a plug installed in a breezway and textured and painted to match an old apartment in San Francisco. The gag was a rocket had been shot through the wall. Carpenters build the flat and built the broken widow, we sculpted the broken concrete, textured it and painted it.
Right, one of those movie stories, the Location Department found a farm from the 1860s in West Sonoma County. It looked just like this with weathered wood everywhere. The owners decided to spruce it up with a new coat of whitewash before we got there. So we had to paint it all to look like the weathered wood it had looked like just weeks before.

A brand new railway car aged with peeling paint to look old for a Bill Murray movie, Larger Than Life.

The World War 2 Submarine from the San Francisco Marine Maritime Museum. we chipped it, sanded it , primed it and painted it to look rusty, then painted it to look like new, all for the movie, Down Periscope.

This was just background, served no plot point in the movie, but is an example of how painting can help the audience suspend it's disbelief. One section of fence had been crushed recently by a falling limb and replaced. In the second picture you see the fence dressed with foliage and the broken section painted ro resemble the rest of the fence.

Painting for continuity. The freeway portion of The Matrix had dozens of the same car. Each had to be dented and painted to match the degree of wreckage achieved by that point of the movie. Fortunately it was largely filmed in sequence, but as often as not, the car you really wanted was being used with a camera rig on it so a new one had to be painted to match.

These specially rigged truck cabs were painted to match the first 2 pictures before the staged crash.

Zion, constructed of styrofoam and painted, it filled an entire hanged at the old Alameda Naval Air Station.

Designer's concept sketch for the sea of faces from "What Dreams Must Come," The set on stage at Alameda.

"James and the Giant Peach" The Peach loaded on a barge for a trip from Hunters Point to Treasure Island, San Francisco, In the hanger on Treasure Island, ready to roll and crush the car.

The carved model for the final dual in Star Wars, and a composite shot using the model, and other images composited in the computer.

Here is what I have been working on this past year:
Samson and Delilah Touched up this show which was the first professional production I ever worked on at the San Francisco Opera.
Tannhauser New production at the San Francisco Opera
Appomattox New production at the San Francisco Opera
The Heartbreak Kid opens in October
The Kite Runner opens in November