Painting for Performance

A Beginner's Guide to Great Painted Scenery

Sean O'Skea

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317360940
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Thema: Arte y escenografía teatral

Painting for Performance removes the mystery from painting and gives beginners the terms, tools, and techniques to approach their unpainted set with confidence. Covering the mechanics of paint and its many implementations in set design, this book provides simple and effective step-by-step instructions for painting a variety of surfaces to look great on stage.

Chapter 1
Paints

Meet Your Medium

The apprentice for a scenic house before the 1950s had a particularly nasty job at the start of each day. He’d get up before dawn, make a trip to the butcher shop, and buy all the hooves, gristle, and carcasses available. Then he’d take that mess and begin the morning’s rendering—boiling large pots to cook down the remains to retrieve the proteins for the paint binder. Ever wonder why the logo for Elmer’s is a bull? That’s why.

Pigments were just as bad. For centuries, many colors were highly toxic. Greens came from copper acetate; in other words, scraping the verdigris off corroded copper. White and red were often made from lead. Indian yellow came from the urine of cattle fed mango leaves. Many colors contained arsenic, chlorine, or cyanide. Even modern dyes can be scary. The “phthalo” in phthalo green and blue is short for phthalocyanine. The poor apprentice would likely mix in toxic powdered pigments into the animal glue to start making the paint. So don’t take your paint for granted! The ability to walk into a store in your hometown and walk out minutes later with a rainbow of ready-to-use, stable, relatively safe paint is a modern blessing. Better living through chemistry, indeed. Archaeologists have found evidence of paint that is 100,000 years old, so humans have been at this for a long time. Over the last century, chemists and artist have made quantum leaps in paint technology, offering a variety, color range, and ease of use impossible to imagine only a few generations ago.

The Anatomy of Paint: Understand the Ingredients

Most paint has three or four major components: pigment, binder, vehicle, and fillers. The pigment is whatever chemicals or organic matter gives the paint its color. Up until the late nineteenth century, pigments were made from organic compounds. The earliest were made from colored soils and vegetable dyes. Anyone who has ever boiled a pot of beets can understand where humans got the idea for the first pigments. During the Renaissance, artists expanded the range of available colors by experimenting with new materials. Most of the classic paint color names have something to do either with the materials in the pigments or the artist whose secret recipe resulted in the color. Raw sienna, for example, is just that, a pigment made from the iron-oxide-rich yellow clay found near the Tuscan town of Siena. Artists realized they could get a deeper orange color by baking the soil, hence “burnt sienna” and the thousands of Italian houses painted this color. The highly prized ultramarine, essential for painting the Virgin Mary’s blue robes, came from ancient lapis lazuli mines in Afghanistan. So this pigment literally came “over the sea,” ultramarine, from Asia to Italy.

Modern paints typically use synthetic chemical copies of natural pigments. So today, the gallon of ultramarine paint has no actual lapis lazuli in it. That’s good for your paint budget. Synthetic pigments have been developed not only to replace expensive or toxic ingredients, but also for qualities such as lightfastness and durability. There are also colors commonly available to us that would have been impossible in the pre-industrialized world. The cyan, magenta, yellow, black printing systems found in your desktop inkjet printer or in the world’s finest presses would be impossible without synthetic colors. What plants or stones could you grind up to make magenta? Pigments are differentiated from dyes by the fact that they are suspended rather than dissolved into a fluid like a dye.

Figure 1.1 A professional scenic shop such as Cobalt Studios will stock many brands and varieties of paint and dyes. A small theater or school shop can still do a lot with a more modest inventory.

Vehicle is the fluid that “carries” the pigment. The vehicle is pretty simple. Its main job is to allow the particulate pigment to take on a fluid form so it may be applied with a brush. In just about every paint you will use in a basic scene shop, the fluid or vehicle is going to be water. Latex acrylic, the most common paint, is an emulsion of acrylic and vinyl suspended in water. The pigments and binders can fall out of suspension if left long enough, which is why you need that stir stick the paint store clerk always offers.

The vehicle does have a secondary job in paint—it goes away. The fluid evaporates out of the paint, leaving the dry pigment and binder stuck to the surface you were painting. The plastics in water-based latex paint are fairly water-resistant once dry. That way you can wipe down your walls or hose the cobwebs off your house without washing the paint away. Chemically, it’s a bit more complicated than just evaporation, but that explanation will do for our needs.

The terms solvent and diluent are related. The solvent can also be the vehicle for the paint. Water is used to thin and clean up water-based latex paints. Denatured alcohol dissolves shellac so it can be applied with a brush and is also the cleaning agent, whereas mineral spirits or turpentine are the solvents for oil paint. The amount of vehicle has an obvious impact on the viscosity or thickness of the paint. With water-based paints, it is easy to thin the paint by simply adding water. Almost any paint, from the cheapest house paint to the finest scenic paint, can, and in some cases must, be diluted with water.

Binder is the glue that sticks the pigment to your surface. Without binder, your paint would never dry. Anytime you touched the painted surface, pigment would come away on your fingers. Students sometimes discover this when they mistake tubes of colorant for paint and can’t understand why it still hasn’t dried days later. In some paints, most notably oil paint, the vehicle and binder are one and the same. Linseed oil suspends the pigment and also serves as a binder once dry. But in most cases, the binder you will be working with is some form of polymer. Different types of latex paint have different formulations of plastics, but they are all similar and usually play well together. The main difference will be in the amount of actual acrylic in the paint. High-quality artists’ paints will be nearly 100 percent acrylic, while cheaper house paints will introduce less expensive vinyl, and even polyvinyl acetates (PVA)—a fancy way of saying glue.

Fillers are simply additives to give paint better coverage or volume. You can basically think of it as chalk, although the actual ingredients can be a wide range of materials, from lime to barite crystals. The filler in most paints you’ll work with is there to allow pastel colors to opaquely cover your surface. Fillers will be added to “high-hide” paints for the same reason. The main difference in paint store “bases” such as pastel-base, mid-tone, and accent-base has to do with the amount of filler in the paint. This is important to understand when mixing your own paint. More on that in Chapter 4.

Additives can be found in many types of paint depending on the intended use of the paint. For example, many exterior paints contain UV-inhibitors to prevent fading, fungicides or insecticides, and additional resins to harden the surface once dry. All of these extras, useless and even harmful when used onstage, are why exterior paint costs significantly more than interior. It’s not “better” paint; it’s just designed to do different things.

Acrylic has a semigloss, plastic-looking finish, so matte or flat paints and varnishes have an additional “flattening” agent added to the paint. High-gloss paints will have extra resins added to create a mirror finish when dry. These additives are often a lot of what makes up the gooey stuff at the bottom of the can before you stir. These additives can solidify after a long time and can no longer be mixed back into the paint’s vehicle. So if you have had a can on the shelf for several years and you can’t stir it back to a nice creamy consistency, you’d better dispose of it.

Additives may even include components to mask the paint’s smell, Basically, what you have is a bucket of chemicals, some of which can smell a bit unpleasant, so paint manufacturers add agents to help make the consumers’ experience opening their can of paint more enjoyable, even though these additives may do nothing for the paint’s actual job. Rosco adds pine oil to the paint both as a mild preservative and for its fragrance. This is why pine-oil or pine-based disinfectants are the best choice for spritzing on top of the paint before packing a can away for a long time.

Be aware that although we talk about pigment, binder, vehicle, fillers, and additives as the “ingredients of paint,” there is a lot more in the can. Unless you are using products manufactured by a company specifically engaged in making 100 percent natural paint—and you’re almost certainly not, as these paints, while wonderful, are expensive and usually only come in earth tones—then there is a lot more in the can than those five ingredients. They may be part of the proprietary formulas that make one paint perform better than their competitors. They may also be the ingredients that cause nasty surprises when you start mixing different products or adding things to the paint. Most companies have some kind of customer support where you can contact the manufacturer with questions about using their product. Always mix small batches and test on samples of the materials you will be painting on if you engage in any scene shop cookery.

Types of Paint

Artists have been trying to get colors to stick to various surfaces for thousands of years. There are countless varieties of paints in use today. There’s high-tech powder coatings applied electrostatically and heat-cured to a perfect finish. Catalyst-hardened epoxy paint and two component urethanes are used on machine and automotive parts. There are paints formulated to resist graffiti, to repel barnacles, to conduct or insulate electricity, even super-slippery paints designed to prevent burglars from climbing walls. On the other end of the spectrum, natural clay-based paints are making a comeback for the eco-conscious market. Despite the dizzying array of paints in use today, only a handful are of practical use in the scene shop. The list below will introduce you to the paints you’re most likely to encounter.

Figure 1.2 Vinyl acrylic paint, such as the Off Broadway scenic paint shown here, makes up the vast majority of paint used on scenery.

Oil Paint

Oil paints have many desirable qualities for the easel artist. Oil can take a heavier pigment load for more intensely saturated colors. The long drying time of oil paints allow subtle blending and fine details essential for canvas art, but oil paint has no place in theater. That same drying period that allows the artist time to perfect his or her masterpiece is impossible on the “always behind” schedule of a scene shop. Oil paints also need toxic and flammable solvents to clean tools. Don’t forget the strong smell of oil paint. At the quantities needed for scenery, the fumes from oil paint would be overwhelming. Be aware that oil-based paints, while less common than a decade or two ago, are still in wide use today, so you may find a few cans in a donation to your theater. You might use it to paint some abused surfaces in your shop or the wall behind your sink, but it doesn’t have much use on your scenery. Make sure not to store it with your scene paint as an unsuspecting student or coworker could try to mix it with latex or thin it with water only to create a gooey mess. Today, water-based paints have developed to the point that there is no need for oil paint in the shop.

Enamel and Alkyd

Enamel is one of those tricky paint names. In the Middle Ages, artists discovered they could fuse color onto the surface of ceramics or metals by applying powdered colored glass and baking it until the glass melted and coated the object. This vitreous enamel process has nothing to do with paint, but the term began to colloquially apply to a hard, glossy surface when, in the nineteenth century, cooking utensils, appliances, medical equipment, and countless other objects began to be coated in enamel for durability and ease of cleaning.

Figure 1.3 Although it is an imprecise term, many types of paint may be labeled “enamel.”

The term “enamel” began to be applied to paints that dry to a hard glossy finish, although there is no official definition of the term. Typically, enamels are solvent-based and contain alkyd resin. Alkyd is a polyester modified with plant or fish oils, often corn, sunflower, tung, or linseed. You might accidently make something similar by cooking canola oil at too high a temperature in your favorite frying pan. Enamel alkyd became a fine art paint after Picasso began to experiment with it in the mid-twentieth century, and you may find tubes of alkyd next to the oil paints in your local art store. Alkyd and oil paint are compatible in much the way acrylics and watercolors can be used together.

You may have used tiny jars of enamel paint if you built models as a kid. Enamels are often used to paint concrete floors or other high-traffic surfaces. High-temperature enamels are used on stove and ba...