Carmen's naked lady towel wanted to catch some rays too.
Here's Simon's egg. 65 for his '65 Daytona Coupe, clearly...
Because you can can can....
Simon's stuffed to the rafters Easter Basket. I think he was surprised the Easter Bunny liked him that much.
"Steamheat" was really simple but ended up working out nicely. The guys doing a weird bird neck bob dance was my favorite part.
The next pretty simple "railroad station"
The picnic had a lot of pieces but needed to be big. It's "outdoors" and includes all the cast members. Nina, the costume designer, did the banner. It really came together, probably because of the swans.
This scene is actually toward the end of the play but it uses the same backdrop as the picnic so it gets to be next. These pictures are actually not even close to the order they should be in to tell the story of the play. But guess what... I'm not telling the story of the play. I'm showing how visually awesome it turned out to be. The costumes and the sets really did look great together.
The office in the pajama factory... The play takes place in Cedar Rapids, Iowa but I couldn't help it.. I had to throw in a sailboat painting. It's Nantucket! There has to be a sailboat painting!
In this scene, and it may be too far away to really tell, one character throws knives at another character. It was quite the challenge figuring out how we we're going to pull that off visually since we can't really have actors chucking projectiles across the stage. In the end, it was pretty simple. We put holes in the desk (the object the knives are to stick into) and had someone under the desk shoving our homemade prop knives handle first thru the hole, hopefully at the right time. Theoretically this was a great plan. Realistically, Caleb and I forgot to even put holes in the desk so opening night little Lizzy Skokan had to locate a drill and get it figured out. Placing the holes on the top of the desk was great in terms of masking. You couldn't tell the desk had been drilled into while sitting in the audience, but when the "knives were thrown" and magically stuck up from the desk at 90 degree angles it looked a bit silly. The rigged knives, by the way were steak knives from my kitchen rammed thru a scrap of luan and hot-glued to stay in place, if that makes sense.
This is the other scene where knife throwing is involved. You know how those crazy Iowans love their knife throwing.... This scene the knives stick into a tree. Even though I'd seen it and knew it was fake, from the audience this little trick looked real. 
There's my super awesome Hernando sign. Didn't Caleb do a fantastic job cutting that out? Took him awhile but totally worth it. This is the only photo I could find for this scene, which is a sad face for sure because this scene really looked hot.
The factory... the sewing machines looked cool, but I wish there could have been a lot more of them...just for visual effect. I am glad, however, we didn't have to make a lot more. It's a give and a take.
I just liked this picture. Gladys has to shove Mr. Hasler in a sort of serpentine pattern across the stage as he delivers a little speech to the girls at the factory.
The breakroom...
Babe's Kitchen. I found some really great images of 1950s kitchens and loved the use of bright colors with white and yellow cabinets. I actually wish I had a functional version of this cute little setup.
There's the red "fridge" aka wooden chest. You can't even tell it's covered in tape and then painted.
And I guess that's it. It was fun times.... fun times.
While Zeb was a busy little butterfly, I made an ass of myself. Ha ha... My plan was to do some pointalism. It's been forever since I've tried that technique and it was an okay amount of fun. I need to keep adding layers and getting a better feel for depth. I also think color would have helped this along. But something tells me I'm just going to paint over this and do something else, that's why I thought I'd post his little face while he still has one.
Then Carmen came over the other day to work on Easter Baskets for her nearest and dearest. She always looks like she's having way too much fun.
She inspired me to put together an Easter basket for Simon, but alas, I didn't have a basket. Have no fear... I can make one. This is the empty Ramen Noodle box with some basket looking scrapbooking paper glued to it. I painted the inside green and shredded some green paper to make the "grassy" inside. I gathered some goodies to put inside but I don't want to ruin the surprise incase Simon happens to check this before tomorrow. Fat chance, but you never know.
Carmen collected some great images and pulled things from some kids books to make a few Easter cards...
I painted some eggs even though I wasn't really sure what I'd do with them.
I ended up just finishing one cute lil egg. I snipped one of the carnations from my birthday bouquet and added some of my shredded grass paper to this guy. Then I glued him to a stick...
and Carmen added him to her basket. Not so visible in this pic, but I wanted to show the enormity of the whole thing. She must really like Chris. :)
Here's a close up of the egg on a stick.
And my last little bit of craftin' fun is the postcard I made Larry yesterday. Larry's love for spring time is pretty much directly linked to woman wearing skirts. Larry's a leg man. I actually thought of this card in my dream. I'd just read Fables; Storybook Love, a comic book where a group of men plant seeds and naked woman grow inside flower blossoms and in my dream I made some cards with woman in flowers. Well, thanks to a great magazine that Christie Cure gave me, I found the perfect lady for my flower and the rest just fell into place. I hope Larry likes his "spring chick."
So I finally broke down, gave up my crazy layers and threw down some white. What a difference...
I had planned on mailing this to Mom know full well that she'd get another note in her mailbox and have to drive to town for the oversized package. The last package she'd have to pick up since it's the world's largest mailbox. But after talking to Cody again we decided it would be cooler if came home from work one day and it was up and full of mail. So, I mailed it to Cody who drove home the next weekend and put the box up while Mom was at work. She actually drove home while Cody and our cousin, Derek, were finishing putting it up but she was still surprised. The poor guys ran into a slew of problems but battled on in the name of large parcel capacity.
Here's a picture of the mailbox in (in)action... nice work Cody and Derek.
I had a lot to learn just being in such a large space. The Nantucket High School Auditorium is gigantic. After working in Bennett Hall last summer it was more than awesome to have wings and a fly system. 
Zeb Bennett offered up an artistic hand when he could, he's a very busy boy. I couldn't be more appreciative to have someone who's hand their hands on a paint brush before. Good help is hard to find...
But the crew my buddies created was nothing but money. Carmen showed up pretty much every day as we eeked out every last piece and finished up the flats. Nothing but rockstars, that's what they are.
Carmen painted these sweet sewing machine cutouts...
Linney, the stage manager was always willing to help. Here she is sporting a tunic/apron. I was trend setting... every one wanted to be the cool kid with the apron.
Zeb and Little Lizzy Skokan had the pleasure of painting over "FOOTLOOSE" that was painted on the back wall of the theater. Poor guys. It was oil paint and Little Lizzy had it all over her glasses, neck, face and shirt. All in a painter day's work.
One day, I believe it was a Saturday, a good decent number of cast members hung out and helped prime and paint pieces. It was a huge help.
The first piece that was really done was the Hernandos hideaway sign. It turned out to be my favorite piece in the show.... this photo doesn't do it justice, it really looked sick all lit up. The entire Hernando's scene was dark. The actors used cigarettes lighters to light their faces and then there were just heavy red lights for mood. I don't think there are any really good pics of it so you'll have to take my word for it.
I'm so glad Carmen was so willing to help. She did a lot and kept me in stitches. Every time I'd break out the camera she'd whip around with the super happy face smile. In this super happy photo she's painting the stairs to give them a corrugated tin feel.
Margie didn't want her picture taken, but she's was another god-send. Not only had she done numerous plays in this auditorium, she rocks, pure and simple. So after she hung the flats with a little help from some of us we could get down to business on "Babe's House" and "the Office." We needed a fridge for the kitchen, so we turned the chest, you see pictured below, on it's short side which worked perfectly. The problem was that we couldn't paint it, so we settled to cover it with blue painter's tape and then paint over that. In the end it looked pretty great.
Getting closer than we'd ever been before... Carmen paints in the tree I shabbily sketched out on the huge picnic scene backdrop. We totally lucked out... these 8 flats were already together, hung on the fly, and painted with an ocean scene. we just painted some grass over the ocean, added a tree, and changed the seagulls to black birds.
The breakroom scene flat was actually pretty fun to paint. I put in a vintage Coke machine and a trash can and lastly added my not-so-straight lines to insinuate corrugated tin. I didn't do much for shading, at first just for time but once we saw it up we realized it didn't really need it.
The picnic scene was one of the first to have multiple pieces done ... we were fitting it all together. I was hellbent on having those swans, even though they fell down in two of the performances. ha.
