meeting with Peter and Pam

This is kind of a no brainer but when you're working with other people it's so helpful to talk about the things you're doing. Peter, Pam, and I had an awesome meeting about color, materials, 18th century Germany, and origami animals.

I'm thinking very differently about the houses and animals in the play now.

Peter keeps a scene by scene tally of "crazy shit" in his binder of things that have to happen in the play like "birds fly down and pluck out the stepsisters eyes". His list and my purple post-its on my script had a lot of overlap and we've already got ideas on how to solve things.

act one (second post)

Rapunzel's Tower

I'm hoping this one is possible. Since the back half of the woods is essentially shapes on the scrim then we should be able to project shadows onto them. I'd like to make Rapunzel's tower (AND the witch climbing it) out of shadow puppets for that first short scene. I'm going to have to talk to John about whether or not this even possible.

The Woods at Midnight

Midnight it when things get darkest in the first act- not to mention that that's the way nighttime actually functions. So for each midnight in the play the set will be much darker with the lights a deep purple and the trees back lit so they look closer to black.

act one (first post)

Three Houses.

The woods are either dark or dimly lit behind a scrim. The houses are very simple- just fabric stretched over wood, you should be able to see the wooden supports through the fabric like these two paintings by German Painter Sigmar Polke. The houses will also be on casters so they can roll in and out.

Afternoon Woods.

You can see all that pink book page "leaves" on the floor of the woods. I'm thinking 8 trees, one stump, and another surface of various plants.

Early Evening Woods

Things get darker and more blue. See how the trees have moved around? There's a scrim behind the 8 trees that has other trees on it- either painted or perhaps just paper and light.

Grandmothers House

The woods are dimly lit and the light is on the house (could easily be Jack's). I love the idea of the bed being green in some way- it would be opposite of Little Red.

studio and sketchbook

Can of markers. Yes, I organize my studio just like my classroom.
Stack of books. I'm borrowing the bottom two from John Trout and the red one is my copy of the script.
Sketchbook to do lists.

trees

Here's the first of my preparatory drawings for the set. These are actually the most recent but I wanted to post them earlier rather than later.

I need to decide what kinds of shape the trees should be and how many branches they have. The trees will be a dark purple and they'll be sitting on this pink foam surface on casters. I'd like the woods to feel really large- much larger than the actors on the stage- my instinct is to have the trees be like the ones on the top row- tall with most of the branches implied to be offstage- it's a little simpler and cleaner and implies that the trees are much bigger than they are.

Here's a drawing to give you a more clear understanding of how the trees would function. I think in person they'll be much cooler- think of this drawing like furniture instructions from IKEA.

The trees will sit on pink foam which sits on plywood which has casters attached to the bottom. This way the trees can be moved between scenes and imply that the woods are changing and getting deeper or simply different.

All kinds of floura (and fauna?) will be below the base of the trees stuck into the pink foam. I'm thinking teal glitter ferns and plants made from paper covered in glitter, red mushrooms, and silver flowers made from glitter pom-pons and sparkly mylar foil table toppers. I'd even like one that's only the smaller plant life. This will be a lot but they should be easy to make- I'm toying with the idea of having a big afterschool workshop or X block flower and fern making glitter party so students we could get a lot done and expand the amount of kids who are working on the set (and for John- it could promote the crew-especially if we invite MS kids).

The sparkly parts on the forest floor will twinkle slightly all throughout the musical, constantly reminding you of the wood's presence even when the action is upstage or in the houses. The glitter also references the unnatural, or magical and unexpected parts of the woods. Plus Little Red gets to pick some of them early on in the first act, since they just stick in to the foam this should be relatively easy.

I'm like the bases being rectangular as a reference to Roxy Paine but they could easily be a more free form and organic shape.

it's a small world

I should probably share Mary Blair's 3-D extravaganza- the It's a Small World Ride. Originally constructed for the 1964 World's Fair then moved to Disney Theme Parks. Unfortunately it's been updated but most of her work is still in tact.
I'm planning lots of flatness used to create deep space- the two dimensional made three dimensional- image made into object.
For those brave souls willing to spend 9 minutes watching it, a youtube user has uploaded the full Its a Small World ride onto youtube. Watch it with the sound off if you find that part offensive and look at the awesome Mary Blair Set! And her use of glitter. She's responsible for all the awesomeness except the scary animatronic singing children and the never ending song.

forest floor inspiration

Ann Hamilton's beautiful installation corpus at Mass MoCA in which sheets of paper rain/flutter/drift down onto the ground throughout the exhibition. I'd love to cover parts of the forest floor with book pages like leaves. Too many might be too noisy. I'm also interested in wheat pasting some right to the stage if we cover the floor.

Dip-dye outtakes from this months Martha Stewart Living. You can see all this when you read their Craft Dept. blog daily like I do. For a little accent- I want some of the pages dyed magenta.

This image is from a fantastic coffee shop in Europe- the whole place involves upcycled books in light fixtures, and in this case the wall.

Mary Blair Meets Roxy Paine

After writing it down yesterday I was talking to an old grad school friend on the phone and I described the set again as Mary Blair meets Roxy Paine. I think it's best in this case just to post images.

Mary Blair- Love the color, mood, whimsy, and the way that the shapes can be both inviting and menacing. I'm borrowing the color palette from the first and third image.

Roxy Paine- Love the hovering foliage- I'm thinking of putting each tree on similar platforms with my own foliage and then putting the platforms on casters so they can move around. His trees are also pretty remarkable- they're menacing yet beautiful and polished.

Once I got myself off the computer yesterday was super productive. After a bunch of hemming and hawing I finally got myself working- and had six little concept drawings by dinnertime. I think they might all be usable!

It was such a relief to find myself working things out in a drawing the same way I do with my other work. It's nice to know that my brain solves pictorial problems like what happens at the base of trees while I'm in the middle of a drawing just like deciding something like a big black shape should go right there in a formal drawing- it's the same kind of intuition. Has it really been this long since I've had to draw this way? I'll post about what I actually figured out and reveal the drawings once I feel like they're ready to go.

I'm pretty happy that I figured out how to have trees that move, a magical forest floor, and (hopefully) use shadow puppets!

Here's my sketchbook pages I was using yesterday. My to-do list page- small but functional. The ribbons at the top are these ridiculous ribbons to put on your conference badges they were giving away at NAEA. I learned the next week that Ann Haney and I had both taken dozens.

I started thinking about Roxy Paine's sculptures yesterday. Especially his metal trees and tables of faux mushrooms. I've always liked his work- super sophisticated artificial nature- but just as beautiful. I'm now thinking the set should be like Roxy Paine meets Mary Blair. More on that later.

Here's my palettes from Tuesday, all printed out so I can see them in my studio and a test page of marker colors all labeled. I like the way these pages look together. The labeled markers were shockingly helpful- I don't know them by heart and the color that's printed on them is hardly accurate.

read through with notes

My drawings that I make as art are fairly formal and abstract. The image above boat is about as close as I get to a figure/ground relationship.

Why am I telling you this? Right this minute I'm writing instead of drawing because I'm a little anxious to get started. I've done everything but construct images. Oh sure there are some awesome woods in my head but that blank paper is a little intimidating- and it's not just one set of woods- its several- the woods change- and then there's all these houses that need to move in and out. AND it has to fit with the story- and honestly- I shy away from story and narrative in my work big time. YET I teach classes like Illustration, and Painting, in which that's what I expect my students to do. I'm excited about this challenge but also a little nervous.

Whenever I'm overwhelmed by something. I usually break things down into many steps. In this case I realized I really needed to know each change in the set. So I re-read the script this time armed with my favorite organizational tools- little post-it flags, highlighters, markers and pens. I'm sure those with more experience see this as massive overkill- but it's working for me.

I made a little code for myself- pink for set changes, purple for things I have questions about. Like will Milky White be played by a person or is some kind of prop object that they have to drag around. After all Milky White needs to rise from a grave- much easier if someone can just stand up. I also made a silly list of places and things since making lists makes me feel more on top of what I need to do.

From there I was able to make a list of about a dozen distinctly different sets that I'll want to draw. Most are just the woods in different light- but this is the fun drawing part and I'll get to channel my own secret Mary Blair. This seems an awful lot like storyboarding- which is what John told me I should do first.

Deep breath. Time to start drawing.

color palettes, first round.

Thanks to some tips from Anand and Laila I've finally discovered how awesome COLOURlovers is. It's an online tool that lets you create palettes of 5 colors that you can either choose from an infinite amount of options or better yet....

Users can upload images and it'll pick key colors from those images and you can structure your palette using those as a guide.

WOWEE ZOWEE.

One of my big inspirations for the look of the set is Mary Blair. Mary Blair is an illustrator from the 1950’s, one of the only women working in male dominated world of Disney in the even more sexist pre-Mad Men era. She’s most well known for her concept art for Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and Cinderella. She also designed all the wonderful parts of It’s a Small World for the 1964 Worlds Fair, which is now replicated at Disneyland in Anaheim, CA, as well as all Disney parks across the globe. Don’t hold her responsible for that scary song or the creepiness of the animatronic children.

So obviously I needed to spend a chunk of my afternoon running some of my favorite Mary Blair drawings from Alice in Wonderland through the photo part of COLOURlovers. This was a great way to narrow the color palette down fast, and should help communicate what I'm thinking in terms of color easily with Peter and Pam.

getting started

Phew!

After months of gathering inspiration, meetings with Peter, Pam, and especially John, and thinking about the show in my head. I'm finally settling down in my studio to get to work on the set for Into the Woods.

Today is a day of making lists, reading and rereading, and getting my head together. John says I should start by storyboarding the show. Which requires me to do a little rereading. I know the show- having seen it twice- but I don't KNOW the show enough to do that from memory.

Back to the big red binder.