Annie Jr.

October 13, 2024

Annie Jr.

Sept. 20/Oct 6, 2024

This was an exciting show to work on, with so much to do! As soon as the design came in I looked at and begin to think, "How am I going to do this?!" But we always work it out and that's part of the excitement! This design had many details that would have taken me so much time, but we decided to save time by having some of the things printed, like all the signs and the complicated wall paper. I did, however, do all the Annie comics on the portal wall that went across the stage myself, freehand. Which took me 4-5 days from start to finish! We don't have air conditioning in our shop so we suffered through the August heat finishing this set! But we got it finished! A shout out to our team who completed undercoats for me or I wouldn't have gotten finished on time. I did have most of the painting finished by the time we installed. I was then able to finish the Comic Portal Wall during the week of install.

References for Annie

I began by figuring out how I was going to do the Portal Wall.

Tests for the portal wall.

Then I moved on to the cityscape in the back. I wouldn't be able to get good picture of these completed pieces until it was onstage. So watch for them later in this post.

I hadn't done marble before. With the help of Jeff, my coworker, we finished all these panels in one day! It was my boss, John's idea to make it have a blue tint. Which worked great!

Then I was onto the side panels for the pods.

Then the desk

The blue fan decoration for over the door

We decided to have the wall paper and the signs printed instead of me painting them. Doing this saved me so much time!

The pod walls opened up and these designs were inside.

As everything was being loaded to go to the theater, I began the portal wall.

My coworker Jeff helped me to tape all the black lines.The tape was curling because of the heat, but we made it work!

Then I painted the whole thing with the red that was darker at the bottom and lighter at the top.

When the tape was removed we had black lines that I could work with.

Then I began the task of painting all the comics on the upper panels! Instead of projecting them, which would have taken so much more time. I decided to just do them "free hand" from the comic examples. This would take me about three days to complete!

These were the comics that I had to work with.

Sometimes I had to simplify the comics. On most of them he words were just scribbles.

Then they faded away on the bottom of the blocks into just bricks.

Here are the top panels

The last touch was to place the printed "Annie Jr." sign on the middle of the panel. I do wish that I could have painted the "Annie Jr." sign, but I just ran out of time and this saved me so much work!

On stage at last!

Oops! There was a mistake when I painted these panels! We must have had them put together wrong at the shop! Oh well it gave me the chance to be creative!

So I just added some more cracks and it worked!

First pictures with the Annies from the two different casts!

I was finished with my painting, so I got to decorate the Xmas Trees for the show! All the ornaments had to be wired on so they wouldn't fall off. I just put on some Xmas music and went to town decorating in the middle of Sept. It was a nice change of pace!