Old School Raisins

Over the holiday break I spent some extra hours in the set shop

at the Clarence Brown Theatre prepping for A Raisin In The Sun, 

coming to the stage on February 21, 2013.

Click here to purchase tickets 

I was thrilled to be given the solo task of drawing out and painting the "billboards" for

the show. Play time for the illustrator!! There were 5 different signs, of which 

I did all of the drawing and most of the painting. 

Here are the two signs I completed first.

The "elevation" I worked from, drawn by the designer for the show.

Finished piece. Sorry for the poor lighting. There wasn't much I could do about it.

A tricky mixture of "tight" lettering and very "loose" handwriting.

The signs needed to look hand-painted and aged. A fun change for me and a

bit challenging at times. Painting in my own handwriting? No, thank you.

Little did I know my hand-drawn lettering days were far from over for this show!

Kelsey, meet the backdrop elevation. 

Thank goodness we had three of us working on it. 

The following images are a close collaboration between 

Charge Artist Jillie Eves, Grad Student Extraordinaire Jason, and myself.

We drew, we painted, we drew again, we're still painting...

How the drop looked when I left today.
(For the record, so as not to overstretch the canvas, we painted all that black by hand..with brushes. Jelous?)

A detail of the left side.

I drew and painted the first coat of all the lettering pictured above (except the "US", Jillie drew that).

I love tedious activities, so I opted to work on most of the signage.

Jillie brought in a bag of Santa candy, so I would reward myself every few letters.

The section I worked on for the last couple days. 

I wasn't done with the bricks on the building yet, but I'm pretty proud of my 

Blue Ribbon sign! My boss told me that if we tossed the drop, 

she would cut that sign out and keep it.

*victory fist pump*