No matter if you’re a student or a professional scenic painter – all artists need a way to experiment and hone their craft. That’s the purpose of Rosco’s new Scenic Sets. We worked with a panel of professional scenic artists and professors to develop eight different practice kits that would provide colors and materials for exploring different scenic paint techniques. Each Scenic Set contains four 6 oz. jars of Rosco scenic paint or coating materials that scenic artists can use to practice color mixing and shading, experiment with wash and glaze layers, or create different scenic treatments like skies, dirt, and foliage.
Using primary paint colors to mix together the needed colors for a scenic design is an instrumental skill for any scenic painter. It’s important to practice (and keep practicing) this important skill with single-source, artist-grade paints like Rosco Off Broadway Scenic Paint. You can learn more about why this is important in our Power Of The Pigment blog. Our new Scenic Sets feature three different “Primary” sets of Off Broadway paints to work with for color mixing and color theory exploration. There are two sets sets of standard primary colors – a Warm Primary Scenic Set and a Cool Primary Scenic Set. There is also a third Intense Primary Scenic Set that swaps out the red with Magenta for creating more vivid colors. Combining magenta and blue, for example, produces a much brighter purple than a red/blue combination does.
Pro-Tip: When mixing colors, it is a good idea to have some neutral white paint on-hand to lighten the hues you’ve created with the paints found in these kits. Our panel of scenic artists and professors advised us not to include white paint in any of the Scenic Sets, stating that “white is easy to get, it’s the colors we really need.” We recommend pairing our Scenic Sets with a quart of Off Broadway #5350 White scenic paint.
There are certain elements that are found in almost every scenic design: skies (at dawn/dusk, midday, and night), foliage, dirt/ground and, of course, the always popular, painting wood to look like a different type of wood. We developed three additional sets to help practice these popular techniques: the Earth & Wood Scenic Set, the Skies Scenic Set and the Foliage Scenic Set. No matter if you’re just learning these techniques and need the extra practice, or if you’re a seasoned professional looking to try a different approach to these common scenic treatments – these three Scenic Sets are excellent tools for testing, practice and scenic exploration.
Last, but certainly not least, we have the Shade & Shadows Scenic Set and the Clear Layers Scenic Set. These two sets enable painters to experiment and practice with the fundamental techniques of shading, and how to create washes and glazes. The Shade & Shadows Scenic Set provides four different shading colors, because when it comes to creating shadows and areas of shade in your scenery – there are so many other tones to consider besides black. The Clear Layers Scenic Set was designed to give scenic artists a chance to explore our Clear Acrylic Glazes and experiment with thicker layers of color by tinting our FlexBond and CrystalGel scenic coating products.
Whether you’re a student that is learning scenic art remotely or a professional looking for an inexpensive way to test out different mixing/painting techniques – Rosco’s new Scenic Sets are a great tool to have on hand. They'll begin shipping in North America in early fall - contact your Rosco paint dealer to pre-order now!