Panto (December 2013). Set Design. Clouds and Bushes/cutting out and painting

Several Clouds and Bushes needed to be made for the Panto.
The Bushes were for the woodland scenes and the Clouds were for the Giants land at the top of the Beanstalk.

I had my first go of cutting plywood and enjoyed it so much I spent all morning cutting out several clouds and bushes with the jigsaw.  :-)     (Jigsaw safety will feature in another blog). 

The end picture shows a sliver I had taken out of the board that the plywood was resting on, obviously got to close to the edge and hadn't checked whether the plywood was away from the bottom board sufficiently, didn't do it a second time though!!

The Clouds were a bit trickier to cut than the Bushes as the curves of the Clouds went down into a 'v' shape. I had to cut down to the bottom of the 'v', bring the jigsaw back a little in the already cut line then curve towards the other side of the cloud formation and carry on until the next 'v' shape and then do the same procedure. Once I had cut all around the Cloud I had to go back and cut out all the pieces that were left from the other side of the 'v' shapes. This time starting on the opposite side down to the bottom of the 'v', removing all the unwanted pieces.

 

After the Clouds and Bushes were cut out, a frame out of wood had to be made for them and screwed into place to give them strength and support. To allow them to stand up an 'A' board leg (also cut out from wood) was hinged into place and a rope attached to the leg and board to stop it from pulling out further, thus preventing it from falling over (well that was the plan and mostly it worked but occasionally throughout the show a bush would fall over). The rope went through a hole on the leg and was knotted, the other end of the rope was stuck to the bottom part of the frame attached to the Cloud or Bush. (I did not participate in any of the frame and leg making) (Ooops tell a lie, I put 2 screws through a cloud to help secure the frame onto the back lol).

 

 

After the frames and legs were made the front of the Bushes and Clouds were painted white to help seal the wood to then paint onto further. Once dried the backs had to be blacked out including the 'A' frame leg. I did help with some of the painting.

 

 

I painted the first Cloud with grey outlines to give it more definition but then went onto another task and the rest of the Clouds and all the Bushes were painted by other Crew members. We had been given a coloured plan drawing as inspiration (as can been seen in top left hand corner of above picture).