Backdrops for Something Rotten Junior (2025)

My daughter is an aspiring Scenic Designer who has been the primary designer on the past few Junior High and High School musical productions for her school district. For their production of Something Rotten Junior, she gave me art direction on a series of digital paintings that were used on the giant LED backdrop in the high school auditorium.

While a bit more impressionistic than fitting with the Renaissance theme of the show, she wanted the backdrops to look visibly hand-painted to match the style of set painting even from a far distance. After the paintings were finished (more or less had to rush through them over the course of a weekend) I overlaid brush details and painted in other intentional imperfections to create that illusion.

This also served as an exercise in Color Relativity – a concept that I’ve understood for a long time, but never really utilized in my work very strongly. So on this set, I tried to limit the color palettes to analogous colors in as many cases as possible and instead imply a variety of local colors through relative contrasts, adjusting value and saturation more than hue.