# Foliage Border



## kicknargel (Mar 9, 2011)

I need to make a couple foliage borders that consist of individual silk leaves (the client is insistent on that) on scenery netting. My thinking is as follows:

-spread all the leaves face down on the paint floor (on paper or plastic) in the shape desired
-lay netting on top
-roll Flex Bond across the whole thing, let dry
-check and spot glue as needed

Any thoughts?


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## FatherMurphy (Mar 9, 2011)

What's the probability of the Flex Bond seeping under the leaves and gluing the whole thing to your floor? I'd be highly inclined towards laying the leaves out on a sheet of some sort of plastic that the glue wouldn't bond to. Getting the netting stretched over the loose leaves without dragging them around might be an interesting challenge.


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## MPowers (Mar 10, 2011)

Having done something rather similar when I was TD at GeVa Theatre, a LORT house in Rochester NY, I've got a couple of questions and a couple of observations. I do think the face down and roller would work if you use a 3" roller and work on small areas at a time and don't put glue where it isn't needed, i.e. not on the open areas. It will take a lot of leaves. Our scenic used a Hudson with a flex glue mix rather than a roller, better control she said, it worked so I believe her, YMMV.

Q. 1. How dense a coverage does the client want? 
Q. 2. What is the design intent to the look, realistic, representational, impressionistic....??

Realistic means a LOT of leaves.

The production was O'Neill's "Ah Wilderness" '82-'83 season. The set was a partial unit set with 6 real trees and two full stage leaf borders. The trees were obtained from a construction site in late fall (that's another story, ask me sometime....'I'm a lumberjack and I'm OK....") so we didn't have to get rid of the old leaves. What the designer wanted for leaves was a very translucent look and his design was to paint leaf shapes on mylar and cut the leaf shapes out. The end result was quite stunning with light pouring through from different angles at different times. 

The execution was not as hard as it might seem, the real killer was the time and labor of attaching the leaves. To make the leaves, our scenic artist laid out about 50 2'x4' sheets at a time, of clear mylar, 10 mil thick IIRC, edge to edge and then did a Jackson Pollock paint job in translucent printer's inks and dyes with something like acetone or some solvent (I'm not sure exactly what she used and it's been a while) so some color went on crystal clear and some etched the mylar a touch. There was no intent to create leaf shapes at this point. Next we had a tool and die company make 6 different leaf shapes and 10 dies of each. They then punched stacks of the mylar sheets, 50 at a time into leaf shapes. We did 600 sheets and we got 60 leaves out of each sheet, do the math and that's 36,000 leaves..... it wasn't enough. The trees took almost 10,000 leaves each. Individual leaves, hot glued to small branches in groups of 25 - 30 and then the branches were attached to the trees. The crew for leaf attachment was ... Dut Da Da DAH! Girl Scout and Boy Scout troops! Also Cub Scouts and Brownies. She recruited the troops and over a period of 6-8 weeks the various troops competed to see who could glue the most leaves. It counted toward badges and she came up with other rewards, like back stage tours for the older ones and their folks. She got about 200 kids involved which meant only 6 branches of 25 leaves apiece on an average.

Now came the borders and we figured we only had about 8,000 leaves left to use. But our scenic artist came up with a brilliant idea. The year before I had built a vacuum form machine with a 4'x8' max pattern deck. We got 4'x8' sheets of the same mylar and she did the same paint job on them. Then we put then on the vacuum table with some amorphous stuff randomly laid under and turned on the heat and pulled the form. It looked a bit like a series of 3" to 6" high sand dunes or rolling hills. 

The finished borders were actually two layers thick, about 6" apart, the front layer being the leaves on net, and the rear layer being a solid silhouette of the mylar sheets. Our borders were 45' long and 30' long respectively, they were roughly 4' high at the center and arched down about 8' to 10' at the sides. The front layer was roughly a foot longer than the back and when light came through the effect was like many layers of leaves. 

From that experience my observations are: It takes more leaves than you think, It takes a LOT of person hours to do the leaves. It takes more leaves than you hoped. It takes more hours than planned. It takes A LOT of leaves, more than you think. Did I mention it takes a lot of leaves? 

Our method of attaching leaves to the net was to make the net with the web top and attach that to a batten in the shop and fly it. This way the net hung like it would on the stage. We started at the top and worked down, raising the batten as we went so the crew was always working from the floor, not ladders or such. The crew of 6 would grab leaves from a series of piles set out by the scenic in various color types. If you remember, the paint job on the plain sheets was mottled, scumble splotch etc. so the color groups were along the lines of mostly green, mostly yellow, mostly brown or tan etc. As you can probably guess we worked from back to front - dark to light. She also had us trade places every two or three groups so none of us started a "pattern". The attachment method???? During the attachment stage we had one person on each side of the net, person in front put the leaf on the net, person on the back attached a piece of clear packing tape across at least one net cord and pressed while the front person held a piece of 1/4" ply as a backing to push against. When that step was finished, the border was laid face down, on plastic, and she came back with a Hudson and did a very controlled light spray on the border. The spray was more controlled than a roller and did not get on the "open" areas of the net. BTW, the net was not cut to shape until the border was on stage and in place. 

Yes, a few leaves did come off in transit, not many. However, at that time the shops and paint area were in the same building, so transit was short, but a little painful, out the window of the paint area, over the edge of the roof and down then straight back in the rear of the stage. Don't know how well the attachment method would work for you. The main points are to plan for a rather labor intensive project. Plan for a lot of leaves. Example, in a catalog of artificial plants, a phycus about 5' tall with a leaf ball about 18" x 30" on the top half only is listed a "500 leaf" plant. Did I mention it will take a lot of leaves?? HTH.


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## kicknargel (Mar 10, 2011)

Thanks, Michael. Those mylar borders sound pretty spectacular. Share a picture if you can dig one up.

I've ordered 20,000 silk leaves for my 4 canopies at around 16x10 each. By my (admittedly rough) calculation I should be able to cover the surface area twice, so I think I'll be okay, and there's always more where that came from. Thing is, there's no way we can afford to attach each leaf individually--that's why I'm looking for a Very Clever Method. Of course I'll do some tests first. We're not going for realism per se--he just really wants the texture of the cutout leaves rather than something painted. We'll go with about 80% density.

Here's another crazy idea I'm going to do a test of: I'd like to melt some hot glue in a pot, dip the net in to impregnate it, then iron it onto the leaves. If it works watch for me to bring hot glue impregnated scenery netting to the market. 

The biggest problem I see with rolling flex glue (or Sobo?) onto the back is getting it to lay flat enough that it's all touching when it dries. I wonder if I could mix up a glue that's a bit stickier to start with. Ooh, what about this: lay the leaves on the floor, dust with spray adhesive, then lay the net on and roll glue?

Still open to ideas.


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## kicknargel (Mar 10, 2011)

And, Father Murphy, those are both good points. I also don't want the glue to get on the face of the leaves and look ugly, so I like the 3" roller idea.


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## venuetech (Mar 10, 2011)

vacuum bagging
what you need to find is the right two-part adhesive
lay plastic
lay adhesive impregnated netting
sped leaves
lay plastic top 
seal edges
suck all the air out of the bag (use a vacuum pump)
wait 
release the vacuum and remove.
repeat as required.


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## FatherMurphy (Mar 10, 2011)

Something I should have thought about earlier - go to the local army surplus store, and see if they have any camouflage netting. It's a large fishnet mesh with random curly strips already woven in, and as a bonus it's already olive drab. Cut into jaggedy shapes, connect together in layers, and hit it with a hudson sprayer to color correct as desired.


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## kicknargel (May 28, 2011)

Necroposting for the record.

We went more-or-less with plan "A." I bought tons of silk leaves. We put down plastic, spread the leaves in the desired shape, lay scenery netting on top and rolled the whole thing with a mixture of flex glue and Titebond 50 wood glue. As it was tacking up we'd "steamroll" it with a big piece of PVC pipe. We did a couple coats of glue. In the end it worked very well. The leaves really REALLY stuck on there. In fact, I spent some time un-matting them, tearing up corners and fluffing the whole thing. The biggest downside was that there was a lot of visible glue seepage, but we fixed that with paint.


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## chausman (May 29, 2011)

kicknargel said:


> Necroposting for the record.
> 
> We went more-or-less with plan "A." I bought tons of silk leaves. We put down plastic, spread the leaves in the desired shape, lay scenery netting on top and rolled the whole thing with a mixture of flex glue and Titebond 50 wood glue. As it was tacking up we'd "steamroll" it with a big piece of PVC pipe. We did a couple coats of glue. In the end it worked very well. The leaves really REALLY stuck on there. In fact, I spent some time un-matting them, tearing up corners and fluffing the whole thing. The biggest downside was that there was a lot of visible glue seepage, but we fixed that with paint.


 
Do you have pictures of it?


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## millamber (Jun 12, 2011)

It's probably to late for your current project, but an idea for next time would be to tape bogus paper to the floor, larger than what you need and draw a box the size of your scrim. Once the box is drawn, draw on the paper the shape you want the leaves of the boarder to be, drawing in any empty spaces in the leaf clusters as desired. After that is done, tape plastic sheeting over the bogus paper, then staple the scrim to the floor using the previously drawn box so the scrim is square. With the design of the leaves visible, you can glue along the threads of the scrim and press the leaves down, without worry that glue will seep onto the front. It's time consuming and will take a couple days to do, but I have done so many time with great success.


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