Your sketch looks great, except the stage is empty! Now you have to add furniture, props, and people. Once your line drawing of a sketch is populated, it is time to add tone (light and shadow) to the sketch. This will make the black-and-white drawing come to life. Before you can begin you have to think about how the set will be lit. Lighting becomes critical to making the scenery sketch look real and alive. More important, lighting is critical to make the scenery look at least similar to how it will appear in the theatre. RENdERINg cue should be evident. Your entire design team will look at this rendering for clues as to how you envision the final production. Keep in mind, now that you've finished your rendering, that there is another way to work. You can skip the perspective sketch and rendering completely. What?! Why didn't I tell you that before? Well if you skip these two very important steps, they will be replaced most likely with a model. A model is a 3D represen- tation of the scenery instead of a 2D sketch. We will talk about models in Chapter 6. Just keep it in the back of your head for now. dRAFTINg Our next topic will be rendering. This is the step where you will definitely be showing your work to the director and other designers and potentially adding color as well. The initial perspective sketch may just be your way of working that eventually turns into a render- ing. It may never be for others to see. But at some point you, as the set designer, have to show some representation of the scenery to the director. Otherwise your budget will never get approved! So on to the rendering step. So the sketch turns into the rendering. Is there a difference between a sketch and a rendering? It can be just semantics, but here is how I approach it. The color sketch is part of your process prior to the rendering. Sketching is traditionally known as being a quicker, more relaxed process. Keep in mind that when you show the director and other designers your drawing, sketch, or rendering, one of the first things they will react to is the "feel" of it. When you are working on a sketch, some- times you have to back away from it for a little while. When you come back to it fresh, you may see something that you didn't see before. You may choose to keep this new "fea- ture" or get rid of it. Just keep in mind that designing is not an accident waiting to hap- pen. It should be considered. Then if, as I call it, a "happy accident" happens, you will be ready to decide if you want to keep it or not. The term rendering is usually used for a full-color, finished sketch, finished being the key word. You should now have the furniture, props, and actors on the set. You should have chosen a specific moment in time from the play. The actors should be in place, the light 96 Creating the Stage Picture Let me start by saying that drafting is draft- ing. What do I mean? Well, drafting is meant to convey information, not an emotion. There are certain things that have to be in a pack of draftings in order to give all the informa- tion needed to build the set. Now here is the key. Are you ready? It doesn't matter whether you are hand drafting or using a CAD pro- gram. How can that be? Well, it actually doesn't matter if you do your sketch by hand or in a program like Photoshop either. What matters, and the only thing that matters, is that you give out the information needed in a way it can be used. The techniques, con- cepts, and ideas are all the same. Remember in Chapter 3 when I talked about focus? Well it's the same thing here. You want the drafting to have a focus so people know where to look first, where to look second, and so forth. Let's begin by drafting an orthographic projection. Orthographic projection is a way of representing a 3D objection in two dimen- sions using multiple views. Have you ever taken a flat piece of cardboard and turned it into a box? Well that is the idea. Let's say we are going to build a table. We first need to visualize the table inside a box. We then project each side of the table onto the surrounding box. Then we unfold the box, laying it flat. This creates two plan views, top and bottom, as well as four side views. It is the information from each of these views that the carpenter or scene shop will need to build the table. This is the basis for all the information you will generate in your own drawings. If you are not the designer, it