It is "Toy Army Tank" green. Like a pea soup green. So it is already pretty dark. I was hoping there is some kind of powder or something we could put on it. Does papier mache always come out shiny when painted? I know someone must have encountered this problem before.

Haha, that's pretty funny! I will tell the set designer about the matte sealer. Hopefully that will work. But this is a big, giant area, so "fondling" will be difficult. Maybe we can just walk around pressing our hands on it.

He told the guy at the store that he needed flat paint, but maybe the guy gave us something else anyway. As far as we know, it's flat. Thanks, we will try your suggestions.

I was thinking about this some more last night, and another quick/cheap solution that crossed my mind is smearing a powdery substance with a flat finish over the paint (basically dirtying it up to cut the glare).  I've only used actual dirt in that fashion (to make monster figures look even nastier), but I imagine children's sidewalk chalk might work, and it does come in green.  The only downside is that anyone who touches it would get chalk/dirt all over their hands, so, depending on what function your piece serves in the theatrical performance, that might not be practical.

And on the subject of paint again, a more economical solution, rather than a complete new coat, would be a rinse/wash (i.e., water the paint down), as all you need to do is cut the glare of the gloss, and a thin matte wash should accomplish that.  If your sculpture has a lot of detail on the surface, the wash (assuming you used a darker color) would also have the benefit of emphasizing said detail.

I apologize for going this long without responding. It's just been very hectic. It's a huge and complicated set, and I guesstimate that I painted at least 85% of it. We finally finished yesterday, and the play opens tomorrow. I'd love to post a photo or two, but it doesn't look like I can.

I told Ed, the set designer, all the advice I got from you guys, and then he went ahead and did what I had suggested at the beginning. My friend Eric always used this fiberglass stuff to construct things like hills and caves for sets, and since we have a giant roll of that stuff, I assumed that's what we were going to use.

But we got this guy from a local college to help, and he said he didn't like the fiberglass and wanted to use papier mache. Fine. So, way back before Christmas, he's tearing up newpapers and dipping it in the glue and all that, when suddenly the guy vanishes for at least two weeks. There is basically only me and Ed working on this huge project, so we don't have time to papier mache. And he did less than a quarter of the set. So no progress on that for weeks.

Then the guy calls Ed and says he's been sick, but then comes in for one day and does practically nothing. Finally we talk to the director, who asks the cast to come in on a Saturday for a papier mache party. They get most of it done, with me and Ed finishing the rest. That dries, and then we put on the flat paint that came out glossy, which led me to this forum. A couple days later, last Saturday, the cast came in again, and they put the fiberglass stuff over the papier mache and then re-painted it. This time the paint came out flat, and I painted the hillside over it, and it looks awesome.

So in the end, we used the fiberglass, which I had suggested at the beginning. Hopefully nobody will ever call this college guy again.

So, thank you to everyone who responded with advice. I don't know why the flat paint turned out glossy, but with all the lights used in a play, that's just something we can't have. So I don't know if we will ever use papier mache again, but if we do, I'm going to refer back to this advice. As an artist I find it useful, and I may just do some papier mache for my own personal projects. So thank you everyone, very much.

Yeah, it amazed me how one person could cause so many problems with a production.

Like I said about idiots.....

Sue

Hi!

It'd be great to see the photos. Adding to a forum post isn't the easiest but...

You can upload them to a site like http://imgur.com and then include them in the forum like this:

[img]http://www.example.com/image.jpg[/img]

Hope that helps.

Russ

Yup - anywhere is fine. So long as you include the actual image URL in the img tag, it should work find. You can "preview" your post first to make sure it's pulling in the image.

Russ