Crafty Tuesday: Set Painting

I was arty/crafty this last week. For the first week of the school holidays, one of my colleagues and I were painting sets for the Year 12 production of 'The Importance of Being Earnest'.

Our brief involved 8 'flats' which needed to be undercoated (to get rid of a previous market scene) on both sides and then turned into two Regency drawing rooms and a neutral scene. The neutral scene was pink (for some reason) and the two drawing rooms were to be blue and yellow. The director had instructed us to paint stripes on the top two thirds and block colour on the bottom third to simulate wall panelling, a dado rail and wallpaper.

This is what we came up with. The yellow one is the city house and the blue one is the country. Now I can see all sorts of problems with them :-) The stripes are not right. They look more like circus tents than Regency wallpaper. The upside down fleurs de lys were a bit of a shortcut to a regency pattern because I had to cut a stencil and this was a lot easier to cut than a fiddly Regency motif. The blue one was an existing stencil which the Director had chosen and I just blew it up on the photocopier and re-cut it out of cardboard. I'm not sure it really works with the stripes. The other issue my colleague and I had was that we felt the stripes should have been on the bottom but the director felt with furniture and so forth standing in the way of the sets, you wouldn't see have seen them.

Anyway, since we took these shots, I have added a red brown stripe to the top and bottom of the yellow border, which helps to define it and add depth. I also want to add some 3D effects to the border pattern by high lighting the fleurs de lys again with the red brown colour. The blue needs something else too but I'm not sure what yet.

I may also add thinner stripes into the stripy part to make it more like a Regency stripe although everyone tells me 'it's just a play' and not to spend too much time over it :-D Anyhow, that my Crafty contribution this week!
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