Tin Beer Signs

The last time I did Always...Patsy Cline, I was able to get a wonderful Schlitz beer neon sign from a friend who is a beer distributor. 

This time around I was hoping I could use the same tactic. Since this show wasn't in Chicago, I couldn't go through the same friend, but I figured I would just contact the distributors who service Door County Wisconsin to see if they would be willing to help (we have a bar on property at the theatre so there was already a bit of a relationship between the theatre and the distributing companies). I made several phone calls and was always able to talk to very helpful-sounding people who assured me that they would pass my message along to the correct person and that I would hear back from them soon.  I would wait a couple days, not hear anything, and then call back again, with the same results. Eventually I decided that I wasn't going to be able to count on getting anything from these companies. We would take anything they were able to give us if they ended up coming through, but in the meantime we were going to explore making our own beer signs. 

The two brands we knew we wanted were Lone Star (because it's a Texas beer) and Schlitz  (because it is mentioned by name in the show). 

For our first try, I found a Lone Star logo online and printed it out as large as I could, I used spray adhesive to attach it to a piece of tin sheeting, and then proceeded to paint over it, hoping to make the colors richer and get an enameled look. It looked okay, but had no dimension to it. Because of the solid layer of paper glued to the tin, it may as well have been a piece of posterboard. 

Our first attempt at adding dimension involved cutting out a piece of lauan to match the sign. After cutting out the full piece, we cut again along the inside border, creating a sort of frame.

The hope was that we could place the tine sign over the lauan cutout and hammer along the edges of the border to create a raised edge. 

Below is the result. It turned out to be very difficult to hold the tin in place over the frame, and very difficult to use a consistent, even swing with the hammer to create the look of a machine punched sign. 

For attempt number 2, we decided that a fully dimensional sign wasn't really what we needed. Just a little bit of dimension and surface variation would probably work. We started over with a new piece of tin, this time with no paper under it. We discovered that a simple ballpoint pen was the perfect tool for creating enough pressure to leave a dent on the line, without risking punching a hole in the thin tin. To do this, we placed the tin on a sheet of foam, so that the pressure was against a softer surface and the tin was able to give way and create the dent we needed when we pressed down.

Since this method doesn't work at all of the design is printed out on paper and applied (the pen just causes the paper to scratch and peel away in places) we needed another method for getting the logos onto the tin. Here is our intern Shannon carefully tracing the logos onto the tin pieces using an overhead projector.

Once the logo was traced in sharpie, the next step was to trace it again with the pen, pressing down hard to create the dents along all the lines. 

Here is the Lone Star sign after pen tracing. 

After the sign was traced and cut out, we started with paint. I had some difficulty painting the Lone Star Sign, because the paint didn't want to stick to the smooth tin. As I tried to add second and third coats of paint, I kept accidentally rubbing away the previous coats of paint with my brush. 

Eventually, with a lot of patience, I was able to get three full coats of paint on the sign, and it looked pretty good. 

Learning from the mistakes of the Lone Star sign, we did things a bit differently on the Schlitz sign. First, I made sure that all of the sharpie lines had been scrubbed off before painting started (I had quite a bit of trouble with the paint absorbing the ink and staining all the way through on the first round). I also had Shannon use some steel wool to roughen up the surface of the tin so the paint would adhere better, and added some sealer to the paints so that the layers of paint might glide on a bit more easily. 

after both signs were finished, and sealed with several layers of spray shellac for shine, I came back with some rough brown rusty paint around the edges and in select other places on the signs to make them seem older and more beat up. 

And finally, here they are on set, collaged with other beer signs, our sconces, photos of other musical acts from the time, and lots of snapshots, postcards and news clippings.

And with our production manager Sarah pointing out her wedding photo that had made it onto the wall :)

Making Encyclopedias into Law Books

For Butler at Peninsula Players Theatre (Opening tonight), we need to fill multiple book shelves. I was lucky to find a good number of books in stock and even luckier to come across a Goodwill store selling sets of nice encyclopedias for $15 each (I bought 4 sets). Some of the sets looked nice and could pass as period, but two sets looked much more modern. 

What we really wanted for the show was a nice set of law books, but those are more expensive and hard to come by. Solution= turn the modern looking encyclopedias into law books, kind of like these. 

The first step was covering the spines of the books with Muslin. We used used a paint brush and some slightly thinned Elmers Glue for this. 

After the glue was dry we trimmed the muslin to a clean edge and brushed on a bit more glue to smooth them. 

We used a small brush to cut in around the edges. 

Then painted the entire spine of the book. We decided where the stripes on the spine would go and carefully measured and marked the lines across all the books so they would be the same. 

The top stripe was painted red and the bottom black. 

Then we painted over the whole things with a thin brown glaze to give all the color some depth and some shine. We used gold paint pens to add some detail stripes and squiggled in some fake writing for the titles. 

This was our first sample book. After finishing the spine, I still felt like the book looked very fake, so I painted the red cover a more muted green. It helped, but not enough. I realized the the biggest problem was my fake squiggled "writing."

I needed a fine print, something that looked like it had been done by a machine instead of by hand (but without buying an expensive machine). The solution we came to was stamps. 

We purchased a pad of gold stamp ink to experiment with and found that it didn't read very well. We had much more lucking using a gold leaf paint pen, drawing onto the stamp and then pressing it down on the book. 

Here are the first set of books after the first stamp. 

and completed with stamps on both stripes

For the second set of books I varied up the stripes a bit. 

And added stamps in four places on the spines. 

From any distance the words are impossible to decipher, but I love that our polite books all say "Thank You" in the bottom stripe of the spine. 

Potting fake plants

For Living Large in a Mini Kind of Way at 16th street theatre, we decided that in the last scene it be great for the two characters to be gardening while they talked. The director asked if I could provide supplies for the actors to fill three flower pots that could fit into the window box (which is filled with obviously fake flowers for the rest of the show).

 I started by purchasing the most natural looking small flowers I could find at Michaels. I found some pansies that looked right, and a stem of greenery that matched the leaves nicely. The pansies also made sense becuase they were one of the few fake flowers I could find that is actually sold in small flats of annuals at nurseries.
I cut small pieces of the flower stem and the greenery and pushed them into chunks of styrofoam.

Gethsemane nursery and garden center in Chicago was able to help me out by giving me some empty plastic containers that the annual flowers would come in, and a flat tray to hold them (they are my go-to location for anything having to do with plants or gardens in Chicago).

 I carved the foam away so that each piece fit nicely into the slots in the container.

 and then I painted them all with a coat of van dyke brown paint.

The result was very convincing and effective, and looked great as the actors placed them into real pots, and then used a small spade and their hands to fill in around them with real potting soil (which could be reused nightly).

The evolution of a weapon

 In the The City and The City at Lifeline Theater I had a very interesting design challenge. The play takes place in a fictional alternate reality, that is very realistic and similar to our own. Part of the show takes place at an archaeological dig and over the course of the show we hear that there are rumors about the artifacts being found there, "strange physics," "magic properties" etc.
In the final scene the audience gets to see one of these magical artifacts. The villain is holding a piece and threatening the detective with it, "do you want to see what it can do?"
I needed something that looked like it could be centuries old, but still technologically advanced, and that could plausibly keep the detective on edge about what kind of threat it was.

 This was the Nerf weapon that I started with as a base.

 I spray painted it this cranberry color, then used spikes made out of bake-able clay, marbles and stones to create this look. It was all wrong, and yet I wasn't sure quite how to fix it. It looked far too "gun-like" it's function seemed obvious, and it's design was far more "Lost in Space" than ancient artifact.

 For round two I removed all of the dart holders and firing mechanisms from the front of the gun. I figured shortening the barrel would make it less obviously gun-like.

 The bits of plastic and rough cut edges inside also made it look a bit more antiqued and less polished.

 Then I added more stones, crystals on top, and a round white "magic-egg" (that was what it was labeled as in the store) on the inside.

 I still hated the look of the piece after the second draft was done. I decided the finish was the problem. It was just too smooth and plastic-y to have believable been in the ground for centuries. I mixed a handful of sawdust with some metallic paint and covered everything but the stones.

 Finally I was pretty happy with the piece, unfortunately the play-write and director were not. Because of the way the scene was blocked, the audience ends up staring directly down the barrel of the gun for the majority of the scene. The white egg wasn't reading as magical, and the way the handle was held made it still feel too much like an altered gun.

 For round four I cut off the bottom of the handle to force the actor to grip the piece differently. I then added a tapered dowel to the bottom of the handle to add a second stabbing weapon to the piece.  I removed the white stone egg, and added springs, washers, nuts, and other random hardware to make the magic of the piece feel more like a technical marvel than the fair tale magic feeling all those stones were giving it. After adding these pieces, I did another coat of a different colored metallic paint and sawdust to add a corroded look to the mechanisms.

 Finally, everyone was happy with the weapon.

And because the nerf guns came in a two pack, I got to get this awesome before and after picture.

Turkish Bowls

For "Night Over Erzinga" the director was hoping that we could have a set of Turkish bowls on a tray for a short scene. 

After doing some research I discovered that Turkish pottery is not only intricate and beautiful, but VERY expensive, and totally out of our budget.

I decided instead to make the bowls myself. Unfortunately I missed taking pictures of them before I started, when they were all solid colored plastic and ceramic bowls I purchased at thrift stores for less than $1 each.

The next few images show the bowls close up after the first coat of paint.

 Next I used a white paint pen to outline all of the designs and to add details. 

 I slowly added details by rotating each color through each bowl, so that by the time I switched colors the first bowl is dry and ready for a new one. 

 In the end they turned out very well.
The director had been imagining that the bowls would be empty,and the food would be imagined/implied as this was a memory scene. Once we got into  we discovered that the idea wasn't working and we needed to fill te bowls.

With very little budget remaining I was able to fill the tray with food at the last minute for almost no cost.

with ripped up upholstery foam

 a bag of cheap beans (less than $1 at the grocery store)

 small apples I already had in stock

 my fake raspberries and blueberries from "The Crowd You're In With" (these have appeared in at least 4 shows now)

And some puffed wheat cereal so that the actress had something to physically eat in the short scene. 

Finally filling the whole thing out with some stock plastic grapes so that the bowls didn't looks so tiny on the tray.