The Nutcracker and Christmas... Sugar Plums, Mice, and a chance for hundreds of little kids to wear leotards and slip into dance slippers. It's easy to be an audience member when it's your kid in the cute little bee suit spinning with the lady in the tutu. It's easy to fall in love with the audience from behind the footlights when that audience is holding you in a warm safe place... when that audience is your family. This is the place where love of dance starts for so many of us...
The Aspen Santa Fe Ballet asked me to repaint their Nutcracker 'book" for the 10 year old production of Nutcracker. No one could tell me the name of the original designer but this Nutcracker is a pastiche of Victorian wedding cake lace architecture and a carousel complete with some glossy painted pony's. It's a bright colorful production with all the whimsy intact.
The Book does tricks. Each page is a little over 8'x6' and the entire book flies in. Six pages are painted muslin but the seventh is a gag page. It's spandex with a split for the Nutcracker to "break" through during the pyro.
the charcoal transfer
It's enduring and not just because of the music.
The Aspen Santa Fe Ballet asked me to repaint their Nutcracker 'book" for the 10 year old production of Nutcracker. No one could tell me the name of the original designer but this Nutcracker is a pastiche of Victorian wedding cake lace architecture and a carousel complete with some glossy painted pony's. It's a bright colorful production with all the whimsy intact.
The Book does tricks. Each page is a little over 8'x6' and the entire book flies in. Six pages are painted muslin but the seventh is a gag page. It's spandex with a split for the Nutcracker to "break" through during the pyro.
They wanted something more colorful.
Seah Johnson , lighting supervisor for the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet redesigned the pages and Danny Bachelor Production Manager had them printed to scale on bond. This helped a lot with all the lettering.
The printouts where then pricked and pounced onto the pages.
pounce wheel used to prick holes into the printout.
bag of charcoal attached to a stick to pounce the design onto the muslin
inking in the design so that the charcoal can be flogged off prior to painting
laying in the design
stencil for the decorative border on the book cover
laying in the border
to get a velvety richness some into the blue book cover I used a dot roller
alternating between green shade blue and utramarine
laying in the decorative border for the text pages
the 6 muslin pages in the shop
text pages
laying in the text on the spandex (you can see the split at the top)
Thanks to Isabel Rubio for finding the fabric.
frontispiece
bookcover
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