This material is adapted from a case study written by Gregg Buck who, at the time of the writing, was Assistant Professor of Theatre, Scenic and Lighting Design at the Department of Theatre and Dance at Sam Houston State University. He now has the same title at University of North Carolina, Wilmington.

The play chosen as our department’s entry at the Kansas City ACTF was 'Eurydice' by Sara Ruhl. The play changes locations frequently, and because we would be touring the production, the director wanted scene changes to happen easily, yet dramatically. This was especially significant when the changes take place between the overworld, where the humans in the play live and the underworld, the realm of Hades.

Also, the play asks for water to be used as a means to communicate travel into the underworld, a reinvention of the river Styx. The touring situation required us to creatively resolve this issue without the use of water.

The idea of using Black Light Paint (BLP) to solve this problem came from Mike Weiss, the student scenic designer and his research for an abstract water idea (figure 1). This evolved into a desire to have a floor treatment that looked like figure 2 for the overworld and, when we travel into the underworld, a black light would reveal, among other things, a floor that looked like figure 1.

After much experimentation and review, we chose Rosco Clear Colour as our black light paint. We found that painting the floor for the overworld was a straightforward scenic process: base coat, spatter, texture details and glazes.

We discovered that starting on a well-sealed surface worked well for applying the Clear Colour. We also found that painting under a black light fixture made the process much easier. Under white lights, the paints are a cloudy white, not unlike Rosco Clear Flat. So, in many situations, particularly when you're applying the Clear Colour to a light colored background, it's hard to see where you have applied it! You can see here a series of photographs detailing the progression of our paint process.

We added blue texture to the top of white swoops. (We learned that, for our application, we got better results if we applied Clear Colour on a sealed surface.)

Our next step was to add the red and green Clear Colour paint as accents to the blue. Green Clear Colour was also used as spatter in the dark voids. We wanted to preserve the luminosity of the green and red as much as possible, so we diluted those colors only enough to allow them to fly off the brush. Because these colors could not be brushed flat, this resulted in thicker deposits of consequence, since it blended well with the underpaint.

Once the floor was complete, we painted the vertical surfaces of other scenery and got similar good results. We accented the edges of the ramp and the elevator with blue paint. This added a great sense of verticality to the set when we traveled to the underworld. (Figure 3). An unexpected benefit to the Rosco Clear Colour paints was how well they worked on fabrics.

And because they worked so well on fabrics, Kris Hanssen, the costume designer for this production, used the Rosco Clear Colour paints as well. (See figures 4 and 5). The paint dried transparent...but it also stayed flexible on the costumes and lost no brilliance.