New York set designer Derek McLane is on a plane to Los Angeles at least twice a month with a bag filled with mechanical pencils, soft-lead wood pencils, small rubber erasers, skinny fine-point Sharpies and fountain pens. He is designing the set for the Academy Awards ceremony on March 2.
"I'll always have a ream of blank white paper, but I like using those yellow, lined legal pads for sketching because it's less intimidating," says Mr. McLane. "There's something a little terrifying about a blank white piece of paper."
Designing for the Oscars is challenging "because there's no story to work around," says Mr. McLane, 55, whose set design for the Oscars last year was nominated for an Emmy. "There's also a certain expectation of grandeur to live up to without being pretentious." Between the Oscars, other work projects and a girlfriend who lives in California, Mr. McLane has spent nearly all of February on the West Coast.
Mr. McLane, who designed the sets for "Beautiful: The Carole King Musical" and "The Heiress," doesn't check bags when flying to L.A. because he already has "so much stuff out there." Instead, Mr. McLane carries everything—drawing tools, sentimental photos, his ID card to get into Hollywood's Dolby Theatre where the Oscars are held—in a black Briggs and Riley backpack that he purchased five years ago. He has a brown leather messenger bag, which holds the same things, for use on the ground since "it's a bit more stylish."
Mr. McLane starts sketches with pencil and, depending on his mood or the project, outlines in either Sharpie or fountain pen. If he has a little more time, he pulls out some of the tools he keeps tucked inside a Ziploc bag: charcoal, smudge sticks and Conte crayons, which are made from graphite mixed with wax or clay. "It's messy, but it's nice for when I have some time to sit down and actually create a drawing," Mr. McLane says. "It's very evocative using charcoal."
Paper and legal pads aside, Mr. McLane credits his iPad Air with cutting down the clutter in his bag. "Before, I used to carry wads of scripts—multiple drafts—around for weeks," he says. Now, he loads script PDFs in the iBooks app for easy reading on the plane. The iPad is also handy because it has Notability, a note-taking app he uses with a rubber-tipped stylus. It isn't as good as sketching on paper, he says, but convenient for when he needs to draw on pictures his associates send and email them back quickly.
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