Rusty metal

I have been quiet for a week.  Last week, there was a flurry of posts as flashy things were done and found. It is easy to write about your progress when you have pretty pictures to show.  The past few days have been much more detail oriented and that leaves me with less to show, even if there is just as much going on.

After finishing fabricating all of the elements to appear as rusty metal, Melanie and I spent an entire afternoon just painting everything gray.  Isn't that exciting? GRAY!... but the gray base coat becomes the voids in the finish paint, the shadows, the depth in the textures.  It is a necessary first layer.  In the past, I have experimented with other base colors and, for some specific applications they work.  For wood, I almost always start with a chocolate brown and then layer on the lighter tones for grain. For plaster, it is is a lighter gray with shades of white and cream over.  For brick, I used to try the light gray/ off-white of mortar.  That just doesn't work. It makes the brick look cartooned, even if it is technically more accurate.  But more about brick painting when I get the brick ready for paint over the next couple of weeks.

Now our set is a little abstract, with our elements floating against black. So, I need to use fairly saturated colors in order to keep the scenic elements from melting into the black curtains behind them.  If we leave too much dark gray exposed, they will vanish when lit on stage.

For rust, we start with a scratch coat of a medium burnt sienna or an orange brown.  I call it a scratch coat because it is applied with a beat up, frayed old 4" brush and literally scratched around on the surface.

 Kind of like dry brushing, except that you push, swirl and dab the brush instead of dragging it for dry-brushing. The next layer is a mixed-in-the-brush dabbing of red and yellow, making all kinds of shades of red, orange, salmon and yellow. Finally a little spattering of cream and black here and there because, in the real world, a surface is NEVER a solid, even color and texture. It always varies in spots.

On the railing sections, this technique is all we will do. They have enough going on with the wire...visually interesting enough. They just need to pop out against black.











For the door, we start the same way, but a steel door in an old industrial building was likely originally primed and painted some color. This paint has long since faded, chipped, and peeled away, leaving only traces of that color here and there.  Because this door will be in a red brick wall and has the reds and oranges of rust, using a forest green as that long-ago paint color gives us a complimentary color and subsequently more visual depth.

 The rolling shutter door would have a steel track or frame that may have been painted, but the shutter itself was likely galvanized.  Galvanized metal weathers to a streaky gray. But there is always spatters of stuff, water streaks, bits of grease that would have been applied over the years to keep it sliding and coiling. So, the corrugated plastic panel portion of the shutter is left more gray, but smudged and aged.

The columns that support the fire escape platforms too are mostly rusty steel.  But, as I described in a previous post when I talked about the inspiration for the aesthetic of these posts, they are encased in "concrete" which has been painted safety yellow at some point but has seen much wear and tear from cars and weather.  So, there is cream, gray and yellow worked together.  Then the rust from the posts would have run down on the to concrete, staining it where the steel sits on the concrete.




That brings me to the industrial loft windows floating above the fire escape.  They are in an implied wall, so are really just flat windows.

I won't actually shine stage lights directly on these windows because then you can see that they are fake, flat panels, strung up in space.  Instead, I want these windows to glow in the reflected light that bounces up off of the rest of the set.  

They are painted just like the rest of the rusty metal elements. Then we stretched mylar sheets behind the mullions and stained these sheets with a water color wash to make them look dirty.  Finally, Gary is seen drawing "cracks" in some of the panes with a gray marker.

You can see in this picture, that the windows are backed with a box that tapers from 12 inches deep at the bottom to 4 inches deep at the top.  The inside of this box is painted white.

I purchased two LED RGB strip lights that are just long enough to attach to the 12-inch side inside the box and wash up the mylar from behind.











With these lights tied into the theater's lighting system, I can change the color that the windows' glow based upon the scene.

So, the rusty metal components are done and stacked at the garage door in the shop, ready to ship out.

Next comes the brick walls and the payphone.  Four weeks from tomorrow we load in.  I think that I am in great shape barring another snow-magadeon or sub-zero week.

Rob