I served as the assistant scenic designer for UW-Parkside's spring 2014 production of Paula Vogul's How I Learned to Drive.  In this position, I assisted the scenic designer in aquiring materials, constructing paint stencils, set dressing, and actually painting, which I will be covering on this page.  

After reading the text, the scenic designer informed me of his ideas of making the set into a sort of junkyard that included billboards and forgotten car parts as a way to reflect the darker and diriter side of the character Little Bit's life.  He also wanted to incoorperate the traffic warning signs to represent all of the dangers, twists, and turns that Little Bit's life has taken her along.  

The process of painting the floor began with a solid coat of bright yellow paint.  From there, we created wooden stencils for the outside dimensions of a road sign and a stencil for the inside border.  These were drawn onto the floor with large Sharpie markers.  Spaces between the signs were painted black.  The symbols for the different road signs were created by making various stencils out of place mats (so that they wouldn't curl) and then applied with black spray paint.  We then added shadow to each sign and applied several coats of spatter to tone down the brightness of the yellow.

I really enjoyed this process, partly because I really enjoy working with this designer, and partly because the process was a bit random trial and error.  We went to find car parts for our set during a snowstorm in January, found a new material to create stencils, and add embellishments to the back fence like lisence plates and shotgun-peppered tin "No Tresspassing" signs.