Clockeriffic

This past week, despite my having a project I am rather excited about, I have stepped away from my work. I'm instead working on a theatrical set for some friends with a local theater company. Their set was conceptually designed, but due to some complications in scheduling, they suddenly found themselves without anyone confidently artistic to oversee and execute the physical, actual design of it, so I traveled up to help.

The show is a set of short one acts brought together by a common theme of time. Thus, the set shares the theme, and is dominated by endless clocks. About 324 square feet of clocks, actually. Perhaps a little more. These clocks are to decorate the back walls across the stage and the front of the two platforms much action takes place on. They are meant to be metallic-ish, gear-like suggestions of clocks more than actual clocks- no one in the audience should be able to look past the actors and go "hm, it's 3:25 and 7:42 and 12:16!"

What all this means is that my head is chock full of circles these days. When I close my eyes I see this:
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

It took one day to paint all of the set materials black as a beginning. The next day and a half or so was spent coating them with a very thin layer of watered down gold paint to soften the black background into one that eventually appeared greenish. It took about three days to draw all of the circles, which range in size from 8" in diameter to 35", with about 6 variations in between. Today I mixed four shades of golden yellows and, with a crew of 3, painted the faces of hundreds of will-be clocks. Tomorrow I'll begin free hand detail work in darkened versions of the paints used today. Here's a handful of the images I'm currently looking at, to gear my mind up for the work tomorrow:




I'll try to get some pictures before the show opens and I leave!