In the starting months of my stage building courses, our first assignments were elements for the Don Carlos opera show that was about to make it's debut in Tampere.
We had to do six tall towers and give them a black marble look, along with two much smaller arks with a black granite texture, which I may talk about shortly in a future post.
For the towers, we used ready-made, 6 meter box-type, wooden structures (now, admittedly, I've seen them lying around since last year when I came just as a visitor to the Lavaste class, so I have no record of how they came to be, how they were constructed and who got them inside the building with little to no damage).
We started off by cleaning up the structures - smoothing out the outer surfaces with sandpaper, sawing and sandpapering the outer edges, making them diagonal.
The inside of the structures were painted black and mounted with additional supports for the wheels. The wheels would make it easier to relocate the towers once they've been raised up.
Moving back to the outer surfaces - after painting them white, we applied a cement mixture to the now visible imperfections, then added a few layers of black, glazed them over with varnish and also used silk cloths drenched in a mix of black paint and varnish, dragged them over the surface to make it look more like actual polished marble.
 |
| After the silk+black paint+varnish treatment |
Now for the white lines.
Marble has characteristically jagged, yet flowy lines, made by water streams eroding the stone with time, and we had to transition them on to the towers with paint. Traditionally, interior painters use feathers dipped in paint to get the marble lines.
We attempted a few tests by dipping feathers in water mixed with white paint, which seemed to make lines just too messy than what we wanted. Not only that, we had to get the placement and flow right and my first attempts were just too chaotic.
After discussing the marble lines with our customer, they helped us out by describing and sending examples of the Black Marquina type marble and their own sketches of their vision.
 |
| Going crazy with feathers |
With a couple more attempts, eventually switching the feathers for a diagonal and thicker paintbrushes, we nailed the marble look, enough to satisfy the customer. Additionally, they also wanted scratch marks no more than 2 meters from the foot of the towers, which I was tasked to figure out. They emphasized that the scratches should look human-made.
I first tried using silicone ribs, dipped in white and pressed to a black surface.The customer commented they didn't want the scratch areas to look too full, but convincing and visible enough from the stage. So I switched to a roughed-up fan brush, which gave more favorable results in the end.
 |
| Silicone rib result |
 |
| Fan brush result |
Final result
theater photos taken by Markku Rowan
