At one of the demonstrations on the Grand Tier, members of the Met’s scenic department carefully explain to visitors to today’s Open House how the textured lace wallpaper used in the production of Lucia di Lammermoor was made. Scenic artist Kay Bloss fills a cake-decorating bag with a substance that looks suspiciously like window caulk and carefully traces a design onto a mesh screen. When this dries, the screen is covered with paint and the design transferred onto canvas cloth—a process that is repeated two more times with different colors of paint. Once this is done, a texture is applied over the lace print with more of the caulk-like substance. Suddenly a textured lace wallpaper materializes. Bloss smiles slyly when asked where she learned this technique: “We sort of figured it out here. Each design and designer come with different problems to solve, and our job is to figure out how to make what you see on stage look like what the designer originally wanted you to see.”

This entry was posted by Philipp Brieler on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 12:01 pm and is filed under 2007–08 Season. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.