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Whether the scene takes place in Central Park, the forests of Lebanon, Camp Mudjokivi, an English garden, or a backyard, many plays and presentations call for a tree or two. Here are ten easy solutions.

This line of trees was cut from 1/8" plywood with a jigsaw, painted black, and braced from behind. You can freehand the shape, or project the shape onto your surface with an overhead projector and trace it. Cardboard and foam core can also be used.

2. Easy Cartoon Tree

Can’t draw a tree to save your life? Collect an assortment of circular objects— paper plates, lids, your wall clock—and trace them on board or foam core to get this cartoony tree. Cut out two trees of same height and base width. 5' x 7' is a good size. Make a slit halfway down the center of each one, as shown. Paint a solid color or try covering with fabric. Use spray adhesive, stick, and cut with a sharp utility knife.

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4. Projection

3. Gobo Tree If you have access to a spotlight or stage light, projecting a tree or leafy pattern can be an easy solution that’s achieved with the flip of a switch. A gobo is a template, or pattern, cut into a circular plate, which fastens to a spotlight to create patterns of light and shadow. They can be rented or purchased from online or local lighting companies.

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Project trees over th e heads of your actors, using yo ur current projection system.

For old-school overhead projectors, make a transparency; black -and-white line drawings work best. Change the season or go fro m happy park to scary forest with one flip/click.

There are lots of We b sites where you can download pr ofessional photographs for fre e or cheap.

Check these out: www.istockphoto.co m www.bigstockphoto. com www.snapvillage.co m

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Perhaps your forest scene is in need of some dead vines. These vines were created using long pieces of ordinary brown paper towels.

This project is messy and requires a large area for drying. But the result is realistically gnarly! Dip paper towels in a 1:1 mixture of water and white glue. Twist them into long strands and drape them over sawhorses. When dry, staple or hot-glue to your surface; add fake/ real dead leaves. Drape over a tomb or gate, string along the front of the stage, suspend from the ceiling . . .

es, a Create a wall of vin ngle, weeping willow, a ju e by or underwater scen lightof ips str g lon cutting 5” wide weight fabric about like and as long as you’d ry the (pattern at left). Va d colors widths, lengths, an tto get a more interes a wire ing look. Just string the deacross the stage at them sired height and toss across!

6. Paper Towel Vines

7. Backdrops

If you don’t have a scene painter in your crew, you can rent a foresty backdrop from numerous local or online backdrop rental companies.

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8. The Real Deal, With Shadows

Use a real limb, leafy or bare. Suspend from above (or mount from offstage) for an impressionistic tree. Shadows cast from a few well-placed spotlights make one limb look like many. Consider spray-painting it black, red, silver . . . depending on the mood you wish to create. The color and intensity of lights you use will greatly affect the look. Experiment.

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9. Abstracts

Turn old doors, folding screens, or fireplace screens into an abstract forest. Let an artist have at it. Or cover with wallpaper or fabric (we’ve seen everything from Christmas holly to camo to tropical jungle).

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Scumbling

Warm Colors

Cool Colors 22

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Spattering

Scumbling involves using two colors and applying them in a way that they meld but don’t blend completely. To do so, use three containers and three brushes, one for each color of paint and one for water. Messily paint several rough patches of your first color. Then roughly fill in the space between those patches with your second color. Using your water brush, blend the lines where the two colors meet so that there are no hard edges. But make sure not to overblend.

The keys are messy, multidirectional brush strokes and blended edges—no leopard patterns here!

Spattering is just what it looks like—flinging dots of paint onto a surface. The goal is to have an even spread of dots, not long lines of dots. It takes practice and a strong flick of the wrist. It’s messy and fun!

Wash

Dry Brush

A wash is a soft, thin layer of watered-down paint. The more water you add, the more transparent the wash becomes.

For this technique you need, obviously, a dry brush. Dip just the tips of the bristles of a dry brush into your paint. Wipe off any excess paint with a dry rag. Then paint the surface using long, parallel strokes, making sure you can see the texture of the bristles as you paint.

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Helpful Hints For Faux Painting Learning to paint faux textures is a process that takes time and practice, so don’t be discouraged if your first attempts are far from photo-realistic. Here are some helpful hints to get you on your way: 1. Have clear, close-up photos of the textures you’re trying to imitate (i.e., stone, wood, bricks, marble), and keep referring back to them as you go along. Paint what you SEE, not what you THINK it should look like. Remember the photo of wood on the previous page? You probably wouldn’t think to grab your bottles of green, orange, and yellow paint if you were trying to paint wood from memory.

2. Use both WARM and COOL colors (see opposite page) and LIGHT and DARK colors to get the wide range of hues and values seen in nature. Warm colors include reds, oranges, and yellows. Cool colors include greens, blues, and purples. A reddish brown, for example, would be considered warm. And gray that has hints of blue would be a cool gray.

3. Many people paint shadows black and highlights white. But if you look around the real world, things are rarely so black and white. Use midnight blue as your shadow color and a very pale, light yellow as a highlight color and you’ll get more realistic results.

Take a look at the example below. Note the use of a DARK, WARM yellowish brown and a COOL, LIGHT gray.

1. Scumble your two base colors, keeping in mind the warm/cool and light/dark rule. Look closely at photos of stone for inspiration when choosing your colors.

2. Pencil in your stone shapes.

Remember, model your shapes after the stones in your example photos.

3. Add shadows and highlights to each stone with watered-down midnight blue and yellowish white. Then spatter your highlight and shadow colors over the whole thing to give the illusion of a rough stone texture.

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