The Paint and the Pendulum

It's eight in the evening, I've been doing some drawing and painting, and I am ready to talk to Miss Heather Small...

"WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TODAY TO MAKE YOU FEEEEL PROOOOUD?"

Well, Heather, I've been taking a closer look at the pendulum for my floor show

design,and going through some redesigns for it. The pendulum and the bronze pipes are the two concepts that I want to keep in my final design, and I want to somehow incorporate Honour and Glory Crowning Time to add a Neoclassical element. Since the scene is open and doesn't require any amount of realism, as the scene is meant to be Frank's fantasy brought to life. I decided to look at the pendulum, and somehow use the clock as part of it. I started by looking at the clock, and kind-of extracting the clock itself from the rest of the image. As seen on the left, the clock without the figures around it and the wooden border is an elaborately carved Neoclassical clock, one that might stand on a mantlepiece or at the top of the stairs, like on the RMS Titanic. Since the clock exists only in the woodcarving, and not as a physical, fully three-dimensional object, I took some liberties with it, such as making the clock face more proportional to the pillar-stand, so that it would look less like a work of art and more like a clock. I also made the stand slightly longer, again to make it proportional.

Below is a similar stage design to the previous one, with the clock integrated into the pendulum.

Although a bit messy (due to me forgetting that watercolours are actually wet), and the colour was a bit lost in translation upon being scanned in, my new design shows the basic form of the clock attached as part of the pendulum's "stem", or whatever that bit's called. Before settling on this, I experimented with having the clock integrated below the pendulum, to work as an extended stem, as seen below.

The initial problem I had with this is that it looked very clunky, and the entire thing no longer looked like a pendulum, as the clock's part of the stem was getting to be almost as long as the piece connecting the main body to the rafters. It also posed the question of how Frank was supposed to dismount from the pendulum after his "Don't Dream It" solo. I thought of turning the clock into a ladder by adding elements similar to the bronze pipes, but I felt that this would make the pendulum over-designed and unfocused.

I did some research on more elaborately decorated pendulums (they're rarer than you'd think)

and managed to find something similar. The clock on the left features a more elaborate pendulum than usual, with the bottom of the "stem" decorated with a carved lyre and a string-like protusion. The added bits are not intended to make the clock any more efficient, but are purely for decoration, much like the Honour and Glory clock, and my pendulum, aside from acting as a seat for Frank. The way that the clock is positioned nearby the bronze pipes would mean that two of the dancers would be able to act as the Honour and Glory figures, crowning the clock.

The colours I used for my painting are vaguely representative of the colours I'd want to use in my final design. I find it difficult to get the colour right with watercolours, as it always looks so different as paint than it does on paper. The curtain I want to be a rich, earthy red, evoking

the traditional image of red velvet theatrical curtains. The gears in the background are black on the outer edges and a steel grey on the inside. The bronze pipes are obviously bronze, but with a more yellowish tint than a red one. The pendulum itself I want to be a dull red-orange, but I want it to have the effect of rough polished iron, like the bottles on the right here. I want it to reflect this texture because it would evoke the images of factories and industrialisation, key elements of the steampunk genre.