Quick Scenic Paint ideas...

[gafftaper]

Tonight about 11pm I had 8 chairs and 5 tables to get some sort of paint on. The cast did a base coat earlier in the day and I needed to come up with some sort of worn texture look. I was tired after 12 hours in the theater and feeling lazy. I looked over at my work bench and saw a spray bottle and a rag... hmmm. I got my rag damp. I diluted my paint down a little so it sprayed nicely, set the nozzle on fine mist. Hit the chairs with the mist then loosely and irregularly wiped the paint off with the rag. Not too much, just enough to leave some wonderful texture and streaks. Took me a half hour to do texture on 13 pieces of furniture. I even went back with a darker color and did some "butt wear" on the seats of the chairs.

This got me thinking. What are your favorite quick scenic paint and texture ideas.

[Spikesgirl]

It's way too soon to be up this morning, but I've got an early call. There is a product out on the market that works similar to your spray bottle. Of course, now the name eludes me, but it is a glass jar and you attach a bottle of accelerant (CO, I'm thinking) to it. The plus is that you just spray, as you would with a can of spray paint, but you load your own color. Much easier on that fingers and you can get some really interesting results. I used it on a 8' x 10' mini drop and it took only an hour to do about three hours worth of work. The other thing that is great is because you're just 'misting', it dries like crazy - much faster than using traditional spray gun. The whole set up cost me about $15 and lasted quite a while. Refill air cannisters were about $5 a pop at Home Depot and lasted about 5 - 6 hours of regular use.

One of my favorite texture ideas is to use that brown hand towel material that is so prevailent at schools and use that instead of a sponge. Because the paper is flexible, you never end up with a pattern - the disadvantage is that you can go through a lot of paper. We had rolls of it, so it wasn't a cost factor for us. We also did a lot with kitty litter and Frosted Flakes (they're not just for breakfast any more...the cereal, not the kitty litter).

For wood graining, we used to dry brush, but now they have tons of little hand tools at Home Depot (Lowe's, whatever) that makes graining a snap. Students could easily grain with a minimum of supervision - always a good thing!

Charlie

[icewolf08]

If you have an air compressor, you can get a spatter gun. Similar to a normal sprayer, but you get a less uniform droplet size. Of course you can load your own color, and you don't have to buy compressed gas cylinders to spray with. Of course you can always spatter by hand with a brush at a much cheaper cost.