Props!

The biggest and most important prop in my production by far will be the painting of the weeping woman. For this reason, I really wanted the painting to resemble old and authentic baroque paintings from France, from the art style to the frame. And so, I came up with the idea of buying an inexpensive painting with an already elaborate frame and paint over it.

The opportunity to do so arose yesterday when Maya took Lu and me thrifting. It was the first time I'd gone thrifting and I had so much fun. There were so many cool items such as a working vintage 8mm film editor that Lu got. Overall it was an experience I was hoping to have for a while and it really did not let me down. 

Us

8mm Film Editor

On the second floor of the thrift store, there was a large variety of paintings for sale ranging in art style, size, and type of frames. I knew that I wanted a relatively large painting as I have a shot in mind where it would be from behind Maya so you can see her looking at the painting past her silhouette. 

Here are a couple of the paintings I was looking at:

 

Though the price was fairly inexpensive, I was little on edge on the size of it as upon positioning Maya in front of it she completely covered the canvas. I also didn't like the look of the wood on the frame and at the end of the day, there were better frames at the store.

This one from the beginning was already incredibly small, however, I really liked the frame and its gold finish. This quickly became something I kept an eye for when looking at the other pieces.

This one was also really inexpensive as the entire piece was made out of plastic. Because of this same reason, however, the painting looked cheap (which it was) and the idea in mind for the painting of the crying woman in my film is meant to be the opposite. I did like though the ornate design of the frame itself though.

This one was probably by far my favourite piece out of all of the ones we looked at. I really liked how antique the frame itself looked and the size was workable. The main issue was the price... it was around 49 dollars and with all of the other paintings available that spanned from under twenty, I couldn't possibly get it.

This is the painting that I ended up choosing. As you can see there's the same wood from the first piece that I did not like and I plan on painting over that with gold paint or possibly gold spray paint that Maya has. I would also have to fix the broken piece at the bottom and I'm thinking I could probably use some air dry clay I own for moulding the piece. The reason I chose this piece rather than the others is because of its size. It's huge (and also incredibly heavy) and the scale of it is perfect for the composition I had in mind. 

Once the outfit arrives for the crying woman I'm going to immediately set up a date with Maya so that she can come over one afternoon for me to take the reference photo and then start painting.