The Scenic Charge Artist's Toolkit

Tips, Templates, and Techniques for Planning and Running a Successful Paint Shop in the Theatre and Performing Arts

Jennifer Rose Ivey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000515732
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre Stagecraft & Scenography

The Scenic Charge Artist's Toolkit is a comprehensive guide to managing a theatrical paint shop.

This book introduces the many different options available to a scenic charge artist, as well as the fundamental expectations and responsibilities of planning and running a shop. From the pre-production organization, budgeting, sampling, and sealing, to practical lessons in efficiency and shop maintenance, this text provides options to organize a paint shop no matter the size of the shop, show, or company. Filled with templates for labor and time estimation; tips on leadership and collaboration; techniques for painting and planning textures efficiently; and sustainable practices in health, safety, and wellness, this book provides guidance and practices to successfully manage the inevitable changes in theatre planning and production. It also offers tips and reference material on employment options, gaining employment, and excelling in this profession.

Written for early career scenic artists in theatre and students of Scenic Art courses, The Scenic Charge Artist's Toolkit fills in the gaps of knowledge for scenic artists in the budgeting, planning, and running of shops at summer stock, educational institutions, or freelance working environments.

The text includes access to additional online resources such as extended interviews, downloadable informational posters and templates for budgeting and organizing, and videos walking through the use of templates and the budgeting process.

1.
The Job of the Charge Artist

DOI: 10.4324/9781003056294-2

What Does a Scenic Charge Artist Do?

Developing a strong foundation in scenic art is only a part of being a scenic charge artist. The career of a painter in theatre has many different levels and responsibilities for each position in the paint shop. A scenic charge artist is a leader in charge of communicating with their crew and working with the people around them. They must plan and negotiate resources, and there are plenty of places that this skill can be applied other than just the traditional forms of theatrical entertainment. Being a scenic charge artist is a complicated and exciting career that can lead you to a wealth of opportunities and possibilities. One of the reasons this is true is that being a scenic charge artist requires more than just the ability to paint but also leadership skills, project management, knowledge of planning, and communication. Scenic charge artists vary greatly in their different strengths and function differently depending on the circumstances. From a one-person crew to a dozen people, a charge artist must be a good artist but also a good manager and a good collaborator.

Many charge artists move into their position from being a scenic artist to begin with, but not all experiences as a scenic artist will prepare you for the job. Most scenic painting courses spend a lot of time practicing skills to develop as an artist. You are trained artistically to develop you style or hand, which must be both sophisticated and flexible. They also need enough knowledge to have a strong artistic eye, meaning that the artist can carefully observe and make connections between seemingly unconnected elements using their background in artistic foundations and concepts. This means that they can discern between close colors, measure levels of contrast, and recognize depth cues in space accurately enough to reproduce them. Having this is sometimes an inherent talent, but it is more commonly a learned skill that involves experience and practice. Ultimately, the charge artist doesn’t just paint by themselves but uses these skills to evaluate, guide, and adjust the crew of painters to create unity and ensure quality for the production.

Although all levels of painters communicate and collaborate, the charge artist must reach out to the entire production. Making lists and thinking through schedules is not all there is to planning, although that is part of it. Instead, the charge must consider many eventualities that they hold in their head while they keep an eye on the cascade of choices they must make. They know the condition of the items on the deck, the plan for the space, and how their choices impact and affect the other departments in the production. This collision of information can seem like magic when the planning of production is done well. There is a huge part of what we do that depends on knowledge of the entire process of theatre and why many amazing scenic charge Artists are ones with theatrical training and experience in addition to their training as a painter.

Expectations and Responsibilities

Due to the specialized and individualized nature of production and worldbuilding, some theatres often divvy up tasks in different ways. You won’t see an identical set of circumstances in every theatre or on every project. Still, the overall responsibility of being a charge artist is generally the same. A scenic charge artist is responsible for the finished treatments, texture, color, and look of all scenery produced for a production. This includes collaboration with the entire team on telling the story of the production as a cohesive whole to fulfill the designer’s vision. To achieve this, the day-to-day reality of the job can be very different depending on what shop you are in. Asking for clarification at work can be awkward, but it is essential. Miscommunications happen all the time, big and small. Often when someone tells us what they need, we are too distracted or assume we already know the answer. The best thing you can do to communicate is listen and be proactive to discover what a particular theatre expects of you.

One of the dividing lines that must be straddled is being both an artist and a technician. You are called upon to serve two masters, one for the business side of production through the production manager and the other the artistic side through the designer’s intention. Charge artists are often a hub of communication between the designer and the technicians in the shop. When reconciling your artistic instinct with your technical expectations, don’t ever be afraid to ask clarifying questions and seek answers respectfully with genuine curiosity. Many designers and technicians have a plethora of skills that range beyond their expected job description, offering valuable input in problem-solving. Sometimes a sounding board or thought partner is invaluable, even from technical areas with no painting experience. The same ideas of collaboration that ask you to consider others’ needs should benefit you with resources. As the head of a department, you always choose whether to take suggestions, but listening to good advice only adds to your success when you decide to implement it.

For a full scope of your understanding, you will have to find the courage to start a possibly uncomfortable conversation with your supervisor. It is always better to set the expectations at the beginning of a contract if you can. Establishing strong parameters for the scope of work will allow you to know what your job will entail and the employer to know what they are getting. Ultimately, the disappointment of unmet expectations hurts both parties and creates a scar of broken trust that is tough to repair.

The Expectation of Product

Most of the time, others won’t understand, see, or care about the details of getting to the finished product, only that the result is achieved. The main expectation when you are hired is that you’ll be able to create to finished product on time and on budget. The charge artist is responsible for all the prep work and planning that leads ultimately to the final finish of the scenery on stage. A charge artist has to navigate the details of upholding the scenic designer’s vision, interpreting renderings, asking questions, creating samples, planning processes, maintaining the shop, and collaborating with designers and technicians. The charge has to have not only full knowledge of the techniques needed to achieve the desired looks but also a firm understanding of different ways to create them. The charge will need to at least begin making evaluations and estimates on material, time, and labor to plan for the show’s production accurately before a full crew arrives.

In addition to traditional textures and treatments, the charge artist can be accountable for a host of other painting-adjacent responsibilities. Usually included in the scenic artist’s purview are 3D sculpture, dimensional texture application, large-scale drawing and transfer of intricate patterns, or even wallpaper and vinyl application. All of the techniques must be planned, prepped, and budgeted for. Prepping for paint goes beyond paint mixing and sampling a treatment to include preparing facilities and surfaces. For example, rented shops and facilities may need to be protected from damage. Materials need to be primed and prepared to take paint, which can consist of a wide range of techniques from a coat of primer to sanding, grinding, filling, or plastering. Flame resistance is also a common consideration from additive to paint, back painting, foam sealing, and flame testing materials. Depending on the theatre and the amount of time the show runs, actual touch-up during the run may be your responsibility or just creation and documentation with a touch-up kit.

The Expectations of Management

In smaller theatres or companies, the charge artist is usually a strong driving force in the physical painting process, if not the only full-time painter. In larger shops, you must manage a few or more people and have a lot more responsibilities. The simplest major objective and responsibilities of a manager are to maintain the health and safety of the workforce; develop workforce skill and cohesion; and support, organize, and direct a crew to achieve the production of quality work. It’s common to overlook safety in a rush to a finished product. Although exact standards vary depending on the state or country, saftey is always a requirement.

Prioritizing the crew’s health and safety is not just the “right thing to do” or a kind consideration; it is also usually a legal requirement. It is in your best interest to have safe operation of facilities, and is imperative to maintaining the crew’s ability to keep working efficiently. As a manager, you set hours, parameters, and standards of the working environment, and it is essential to enforce and embrace a culture of safety. As a charge artist, you won’t always have full authority of space and practices, as you’ll be looking to follow the established safety plans of an institution, but as a freelancer, that is solely your responsibility. Additionally, you have an impact on setting norms and standards beyond your presence in an impressionable artist’s life, especially if you are training students or interns.

As a manager, you often have input in the hiring, interviewing, and planning of your workforce, but after that, you have the difficult task of their development. Especially in the theatre, you will be faced with unique and exciting challenges on every production, and therefore we must expect experimentation. As a manager, I consciously choose to celebrate growth and creation. We won’t ever be able to hire someone who knows absolutely everything, but by being a coach and a mentor, we develop an artistic staff that works together to solve problems and produce. This process includes everything from onboarding, training documentation, and special techniques to foster a spirit of teamwork, reliability, and collaborative art. This development is an essential tenet of a manager and allows them to enable the success of their team.

Communication is essential in cultivating a culture of shared purpose toward your goal. As a manager, you are effective for your crew when you provide unambiguous direction and attentive oversight to help them take ownership over their responsibilities. You also have to give those instructions in a realistic and reasonable timeframe. Setting up your crew for success is essential in providing information just as much as providing materials, tools, and access. Similar to the communication with your crew, your communication with the rest of the design and production team in meetings is necessary. As the charge artist, you are the authority on what needs to be provided, and you must communicate that. Whether you are managing expectations on what you will deliver or getting more information, being concise, clear, and open is always valuable in an environment strapped for time and resources.

There is also a level of responsibility as a manager and a leader of your team to model and foster the respectful and positive environment you want to cultivate in your crew and try to listen to the constraints of human needs on your team. Managers also have an inherent amount of default authority and power over their employees; that power cannot be turned off, so your suggestions are often seen as directives. If you don’t spend at least a reasonable time providing context for your decisions, investing in the buy-in of your team, then you will have to deal with unwelcome resistant behavior later.

Who’s Who in the Paint Shop: Roles

Every company has a hierarchy to send information and artistic decisions down the chain of command. While many organizations arrange themselves differently, this structure is vital in making sure a productive business runs smoothly and decision making is consistent with the mission of the production and organization. Quite often, we don’t think of theatre as a place with a high degree of hierarchy since the working relationships are highly collaborative, but ultimately the vision must be guided clearly from one voice. We use the idea of these roles to facilitate communication and unify the direction of the show. You can also get an idea of whom to collaborate with or whom to ask for additional resources. When making the transition from being supervised to supervising, it can be a very new perspective on the other side of the desk. It is a big shift in responsibility from project focus to the entire scope of work.

Figure 1.1 Hierarchy of Theatre

In looking at the theatre hierarchy, particularly for technicians, it is most beneficial to break it into lines for artistic and management resources. In the theatre, we all work to serve the collective story and make art together, but there has to be a unified vision for this artistic endeavor, or we risk too many cooks in the kitchen. Designers aren’t, however, generally going to be able to set your hours or have the authority to approve over-hire. We defer to the designer in each area for artistic vision and guidance, but we cannot bother them with every single question down to which screw will be in a unit. Designers provide extensive and specific information, but there are still many details and gaps that need to be filled in, whether artistic, engineering, or scale related. At every company level, everyone reports up to a person above them, artistically, professionally, or both. Understanding that hierarchy gives us the lines of communication and responsibility to ensure that all areas have the preparation and information they need to complete their piece of the puzzle in their collaboration.

The administrative staff consists of positions vital to the operations of a company without necessarily creating physical product. These positions can include anything from marketing, human resources, box office, company manager, building supervisor, and finance manager to many other vital roles. They often help with budget, hiring, and business-related matters in theatre operation if not also doubling as another team member.

The artistic staff consists of the design team, director, choreographer, musical director, and artistic director. They are responsible for the vision of the overall show in their discipline. Designers are accountable for each of their respective technical areas and are therefore the artistic leads of each sp...