Young Alumnae of the Year 2012!

Bonnie McDonald Grubbs (’08 – Theatre Performance) was named the 2012 Belhaven University Young Alumnae of the Year!  After completing her undergrad work at Belhaven, Bonnie finished a masters in education at Mary Baldwin College before accepting a position at Achievement First, a charter school in Brooklyn, New York – where her class is named ‘Belhaven’ and her student scholars are ‘Blazers’.  We are so very proud of Bonnie’s accomplishments – and pleased to see her continuing to use all of her gifts to do the Lord’s work.

View the video of her speech at the Homecoming Luncheon!

Bonnie McDonald Grubbs and her husband Alex visiting Belhaven for Homecoming 2012

Henry V Painting work

The painting work for Henry V by Shakespeare has been a several step process.  Whenever there is painting that takes multiple layers to get to your final product, it takes more time to get finished because of paint drying time between layers.  However the end product is always worth the wait.  For Henry V the set is very bare, not many added pieces and most of the stage is set on a rake.  This adds another element to painting because you can not paint on the stage or the paint will run.  So all of the stage painting was done on the floor and added to the stage when it was finished.  It was done as a three tone wetblend, writing was added on top of that, which we sealed with a clear glaze.  After it was sealed the large text was added on top of the main center stage area, than the whole stage was dry brushed with two different glazes.  One glaze was simply tinted black, the other has a textured black metallic paint added to it.  This added a couple things to the stage for us, one, it gave it a rougher finish so that the actors won’t slip as easily, especially working on a rack, and two, it added a bit more shine to the finish.  The finished product has the actors walking and acting on Shakespeare’s words as they perform.  Bellow are several pictures of the process and the finished work.

Step 2 in the painting process, adding the text.

We used this to set up and paint all of the flooring.

Section with the most layering.

Finished floor with rendering. Already put onto the stage.