The Charlie Brown-iest Sets

Our school is putting on a production of "You're a Good Man Charlie Brown!" We are excited and it was very important to me to make the sets as true to the style of Charles Schultz, as I could.









Here's what I did. Because we have four 8' X 4' panels, I cut out a piece of paper that was twice as long at it was tall, which in this case was 9" X 18". I folded it in half to make 2 squares and in half again, so that each section was half a square. this kept things proportional for our panels.

Then I looked up a lot of Peanuts images to get ideas before making a sketch on the paper. I traced the sketch onto plastic, and projected that onto the panels with an old overhead projector. It only takes a few minutes to trace the image (in chalk) before tracing again with black paint. I used this so that my visually impaired students could better see where to paint. My young helpers are legally blind.

I had a can for each primary color, which I used to mix to get as close as I could to the Charles Schutlz color pallet. And then a couple students and I painted like crazy. It was strange to to see one scene covered up little by little by a new one.

We also painted six 2' cubes with coasters, one for each of the main characters to sit upon,

...as well as Snoopy's doghouse, Lucy's Psych office, a big mailbox, and Schroeder's piano. As a huge Peanuts fan myself, I had a lot of fun working on this show and can't wait to see it performed.