A Ship!

Today, I’m sharing another project from the children’s show I’m working on (yes, the same show as the compass). This is something I’m really quite proud of, as it took me much longer than strictly necessary.

One thing you should know about this show before I start telling you about my ship, is that it’s a show about travel, and especially a show about boats. It also included many, many simpler boats, many of which I also made out of cardboard.

My ship is made of an old shirt, cardboard, ka-bob skewers, and some paint (and bits and bobs I had stashed away)

I glued together some skewers for the masts and painted them.

Then I created the sides of the boat from a few layers of cardboard and hot glue (I used over 3 packages of hot glue for the show!)

I built a few decks, and started to lay in some shading,

and then continued the wood-grain painting for the rest of the ship.

Finally, I added some sails!

and some “rope”, chain, and other “nautical accessories”.

This picture better represents the color of the paint, and you can see some of the “nautical accessories”. All in all it took me almost 15 hours (probably, I wasn’t counting) to build this really fun piece, which is headed for an elementary school classroom after the show ends. In total I spent about 1$ on the old shirt, and 3$ on the ka-bob skewers (which I’d actually purchased for the pile of boats shown above, so it kind of doesn’t count). The paint and “nautical accessories” I already had.

And a bonus picture of the compass under light! It looks so good!

Lots of Cardboard

Hi! Just a quick note- I’ve been in the middle of tech this week and next week, but I wanted to share something I made with lots of cardboard and some paper and paint for a children’s show I’m working on.

It’s a compass! It’s large! You can move the dial by hand!

This show is seriously adorable though, and I can’t wait to share more of my projects from it with you next week. 🙂

Decadent Pillows

For an opera called Der Vampyr, I made this delicious set of Victorian-inspired throw pillows for a vampire’s den.

 

They’re quite a bit of fun.

I used elements from each of these Victorian (or Victorian inspired) reference pillows. See if you can spot the places I drew from!

 

They’re pretty delicious, all made with bits of satin, lace, velvet, and silk ribbon.

 

Finally, the Show Opened

As you may well have guessed from the opening image, I finally have photos from Top Girls, complete with photos of the dinner table, the culmination of my Not Food Project.

Check out more photos on my website here!

Profiteroles

Hi all!

April got really crazy, among a few other shows, Top Girls went up (all of the Not Food project finally ended up on stage!) and I just wanted to share a last minute item which ended up being added the day before final dress.

These are profiteroles, which look like this if you needed a reminder.

 

This actually, and for real, wraps up the Not-Food project really nicely. I’ll add a quick note when I have production photos available!

Chicken Risotto with Roasted Mushrooms

Finally we’ve reached the last installment of my not-food project. It’s been a super fun journey, and I’ll definitely have other creative prop things to share here soon, but things are about to get busy as the shows pick up so bear with me.

I just wanted to share this really cool chicken and risotto dish I made by carving wood for the chicken, and using pleather to make dark roasted mushrooms.

I’ll be the first to admit that my Chicken and Risotto is a little different than my research image, but I’m pretty proud of the result!

Say Cheese!… and Crackers

Today I finished yet another dish– a cheese and cracker platter.

The cheese was made of felt, machine made, although I did embellish some of it so that I could make some marbled jack.

The crackers were actually made from fabrics I’ve already used, the triscuit style woven crackers were made from the cuffs of the sweater from the rolls, and the puffy crackers from the fabric I used for the zabaglione all that time ago.

I basically just glued marbles, from the Waldorf salad, together to make the grapes with a wire stem.

Anyone feeling peckish?

Waldorf Salad

Back to the fake food, I did my best to approximate Waldorf Salad today.

This was my research photo.

For the salad part I started with a bunch of bits and bobs and odd things, beads, sea glass, and marbles, and I glued them together into the salad in the middle.

Then, all I had to do was add feathers!

Soup!

I took a big risk this weekend. I made not-soup. It took me weeks to figure out how to make it. I decided early on that it couldn’t both look good and be any kind of soup with chunks in it. So some kind of tomato or butternut squash soup it was.

This was my reference image.

I started by lining the bowls, but quickly gave up on that effort.

It’s really easy to poke holes in the foil.

That’s right, I made soup with melted wax.

I ended up pouring most of my pure red candle wax into the base of the bowl, and then covering a color-altered version made with a mixture of crayons and the red wax. You can see the base version on the right.

 

Add a little paint and some fabric garnish, and voila! Soup! Or rather, not-soup!

Steak and Potatoes

Vegetarians look out! This project was actually a bit of a process for me. I didn’t have a really clear idea what I was looking for for the steak specifically. I was looking at reference photos of real steak and photos of fake steak that I had collected from the internet, and I couldn’t really rectify the differences between them in my head.

I started with both of these images.

As you can see, the first one is more of a caricature of a T bone stake made of felt than anything else, and the second is an actual photo of a steak from a food magazine.

I couldn’t decide quite how to go about this, so I ended up making one of each. Not surprisingly, it was the more “realistic” version that was a little bit more difficult than the caricatured version.

I started by felting some variation colors onto a machined felt fabric,

Then, I added some dimension with brown felt, stuffed the pieces and added some more dimension with a sharpie.

It really did end up looking great all put together.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t really look as much like steak as it does like meatloaf, or a pork brisket. And I really needed STEAK.

Thankfully, a cartoonish T Bone steak was not hard to reproduce. I figured, hey, when there’s stuff like this on your table…

… and a salad made of feathers yet to come, perhaps realism should take a seat to the cartoonish fanciful version of food.

I did want to point out the green beans on those plates too, because I was able to reuse something I never thought I’d actually end up using, some old bright green straws we have left over from an old roommate!

I basically loosely glued fabric around them, so that they’d have some dimension, and the right color. The dish, all tolled, came out better than I thought it would, and now the director has a choice between two versions of the same dish- always awesome!