Who's Prettier, the People or the Trees?

Ideally it is a toss up.

“Cut the trees out and paint them glossy black. It always works.”

That is from the mouth of a lighting designer 400 shows and 30 years into his career. He meant that trees work if they are 2-dimensional. So, in the model, just cut them out of board with an X-acto blade, spray them with black spray paint, put them on a stand and voila!

For the real design you build a ‘flat’ out of something…flat, like a plywood like luan. I bet that Treasure Island design in the big picture above has those big flat trees on tracks with wheels. They can slide them in and out. We have loved a flat piece of scenery for a very long time, this magazine page is from 1924.