Once upon a time I was a scenic designer for the theatre and what I discovered was that I loved making visual art, but I did not enjoy the business of designing for the theatre. Now I take any opportunity I can to create things and when they are large scale collaborative projects I get super excited!
Last year I started working with my friend Mackenzi to design and implement windows for her amazing store Site. That year we created this birds and bees window.
In April we did a window based on El Dia De Los Muertos.
When we did this window I developed a method for transferring a complicated design to the window by doing a full scale illustration in Adobe Illustrator 4.
Mack and I have been going back and forth with ideas for the window this fall, but when she said Theatre- I felt like we were onto something amazing. When I was in college my scenic professor designed this amazing set based on a Victorian toy theatre. The set was for the Thorton Wilder play Skin of Our Teeth.
Mackenzi already put an amazing post on her blog about how we painted the window, so I wanted to give you a window (pun intended) into the process we used to get there.
I started by building a Pinterest board with design inspirations.
After that Mackenzi and I sat down to have a design meeting where I did this cocktail napkin sketch.
Once the sketch was done I made a document in Adobe Illustrator that was the same size as the window. I drew the entire thing for one side, flipped it and altered the other side a little bit for visual interest. I also colored one in so that we would have a piece of color reference while we painted, it looked like this.
Once the design was done I created an additional scale document that split the art board into 64 letter size paper sheets. This was the document we printed to lay out the design in the window.
Mack and I went to our local neighborhood craft shop to procure paint and the process took a full day, plus some added work on her part while I was off being a clown. The rest of the story can be read here on Sites blog.
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I live 2 blocks away from Site and have passed this window many times. A friend and I were just studying it last week. You did an amazing job!
Thank you so much. I’m glad you enjoy the window. Say hi if you ever see us around with the dogs!
WT