A Split-Second of Clumsiness, an Hour of Damage Control
Wednesday was as bad as Tuesday was good.
My expectations weren't that high to begin with, since this is one of those evenings where my true "free" time doesn't begin until ~8:30pm. Can't spray any adhesive on tree armatures when it's dark, and that is why I pre-dressed so many of them on Tuesday afternoon. My plan was to install some of the finished trees along the backdrop edge of the triangle. But first, I needed to apply a bit of soil-colored latex paint over a spot where the white hydrocal had been unearthed by the drill bit.
This target area was in the exact center of the Blob, so I had to lean over really far to touch it up. As soon as the paint was applied, I started to make my body upright again but I briefly lost my balance - and the paint brush, still wet with grayish-brown paint, made contact with the blue-sky backdrop...
oh S**T!! I frantically attempted to soak off the brown spot, but it was no use; flat latex paint is very absorbent, and no amount of scraping or sanding would
ever bring it back to its original shade of blue.
Most of you will probably say "Hey, no problem, just paint a cloud or two over the stain." Sorry, but that's not an option for me because I don't do clouds on my backdrops. Since I might want to stage the same scene for two different time periods, I don't want the same cloud pattern to be in the exact same spot in a subsequent photo, days or months after the first one.
Yet, miraculously, short time later I found a sample jar of the very same color [Behr Impressionist Blue] of latex paint. Great -
except it was not part of the same batch that I had rolled onto my backdrop panels six years ago, so the color was going to be slightly off, either too dark or too light. I was wishing I could just "photoshop" it using the so-called airbrush feature, where I would gradually merge the two shades of blue over a broad area.
And that's when the "light bulb" lit up for me - if I could just avoid applying the new paint
laterally, I could also avoid brush streaks! I would apply it very lightly, perpendicular to the backdrop surface, and hopefully maintain the original texture. So I took a small (0.5-inch diameter) stippling brush and applied
extremely light splotches of blue paint over the stain and the surrounding area - heavier over the stain, and gradually more sparingly moving outward. There could not be any perceptible boundary between the old paint and the new.
At first it resembled a very faint white cloud; not perfect, but better than the alternative. But once the paint was fully dried, it was almost the exact original color!
In the end, all I lost was an hour of originally-planned mrr time. Hopefully, somebody reading this can learn from my experience if the same thing should ever happen to them!