Hand and Paper Props

Potato

2024

For this original devised production, the director wanted a potato that was normal on one side and rotten on the other to represent the Irish potato famine. To achieve this, I pulled a plastic potato we had in our fruit and vegetable stock and looked up potato reference images. The potato I found looked most similar to a Yukon gold, so I mixed up a brownish-gold base color and went in with that over the whole thing. I mixed up a few levels of darker brown and stippled that on with a dense brush, and then filled in the pits and holes the prop already had with the darkest brown I had mixed. After letting that dry, I began work on the other side. Using a reference image of a rotting potato, I went in with a base of that darkest brown I’d already made and then filled in the pits and lumps with a bit of Van Dyke Brown. I used that same paint color to add some darker veining along the potato, then went in with another dense brush and a pale green mixture we already had on hand from a previous show to stipple on some green spots to replicate mold. I sealed it with a flat sealer, and the prop went into rehearsal the next day.

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Shawarma

2024

This script had a scene where one character bought shawarma from another, so I used a cardboard tube and a newspaper I already had made for the same show that later got cut to create the wrap. I cut the cardboard tube down to about a foot and a half, then I wrapped it loosely in the newspaper and taped it down using double-sided tape. Eventually, I was going to use a mixture of gray paint and water to create grease stains, but the prop ultimately got cut before I got to that step.

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Newspaper

2024

For this show, the director wanted a New York newspaper with the headline “Police Crack Down on Protests,” so I found a base newspaper online and edited that in Photoshop. I erased the original headline, color matched the writing on the rest of the page, and matched the new headline’s font to the font on the rest of the page. I stretched the lettering vertically to better match the rest of the paper. We then printed out a few different sizes and landed on a 9”x17” newspaper that I rolled up and tied with string to send into rehearsal for the director and fights/intimacy director to see. My next step was going to be to tape or glue the edge of the page down, but the scene this prop was for ultimately got cut.

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