Mardi Gras: Behind The Scenes
By Michele Ostrove   

Photos by Lucien Bonnafoux

For coatings applicator Robert Gonsoulin of Blaine Kern Studios, it may be said that life – at least his work life – is a parade.

Actually, it’s nearly 60 parades each year, featuring the likenesses of Rhett Butler, Marilyn Monroe, Spiderman, Poseidon, and Hulk Hogan, which are an integral part of New Orleans’ Mardi Gras celebration. Gonsoulin personally helps create as many as 100 of the colorful, three-dimensional props that make Mardi Gras come to life. He uses steel, foam, papier-mâché, and either fiberglass, urethane, or polyurea coatings. It’s a job he loves.

“I’m always doing something different and I’m never bored,” he notes, recalling the six weeks he spent in Korea making and installing props for a very different cultural observance. “I’m always working my mind to figure out what to do. It is a job that keeps you on your toes.”

It is also a job that brings smiles to a lot of faces. From 12 days after Christmas until “Fat Tuesday,” the day before Lent begins, some 500 floats in 80 or more parades weave through the streets of New Orleans, accompanied by thousands of revelers who travel from around the world to experience this unique city. Seventy-five percent of those floats are manufactured at Blaine Kern Studios, located on Algiers Island, a short ferry ride across the murky Mississippi from downtown New Orleans. 



A World Of Its Own

As Gonsoulin heats his Gusmer Marksman proportioning unit and prepares to spray a giant bust of Poseidon with a polyurea hardcoat, Barry Kern, president of the Blaine Kern Studios, talks about the history of the company.

Barry’s grandfather, Roy Kern, became involved in the float-making business in the 1930s and Roy’s son, Blaine, officially opened the studio in 1947, earning the local title of “Mr. Mardi Gras.” Today, the company consists of Kern Studios, which handles production, and Mardi Gras World, run by Barry’s brother Brian. The facility welcomes some 150,000 visitors a year in public tours and serves as a one-of-a-kind venue for 150 private events. They’re staged in one of two huge rooms lined with enormous floats that are lit by tens of thousands of fiber-optic lights. Besides Mardi Gras, the studio supplies props for clients including Universal Studios, Disney, a variety of malls, theme parks, parades, and “just about anyone else in the entertainment industry,” Kern says. “Our work appears throughout the United States and in 11 foreign countries,”

A walk through the massive warehouses that comprise the 75,000-square-foot Blaine Kern Studios offers a glimpse into the fascinating and grotesque world of prop-making. A snake-encircled head of Medusa sits alongside an assortment of fish, cowboys, angels, championship wrestlers, and the Wright Brothers. The oversized, disembodied heads of Bruce Springsteen, Mick Jagger, Tina Turner, and dozens of others peer down on visitors from a shelf that lines an entire wall. Further into the bowels of the warehouse, artist Charles Benzans applies acrylic paints to bring vivid realism into the face of Magneto and Mystique, two of the characters from the “X-Men” movies.

The designs and themes of the props and floats are dictated each year by the Mardi Gras organizations known as “Krewes” that put on the various parades. They are usually named after a particular mythological hero or Greek god. It’s a tradition that dates from the 1700s, when the French in New Orleans began holding private masked balls and parties. According to Kern, the first real parade was held in 1877 by the Krewe of Momus. Its theme, “Hades, a Dream of Momus,” ridiculed President Grant and his Administration. If the warehouse stock at Mardi Gras World is any indication, today just about anyone is fair game.

High Tech Coatings Save Time, Add Durability

Blaine Kern Studios relies on a creative stable of nearly a dozen artists and fabricators to create its spectacular floats, which can reach up to 240-feet long and can take anywhere from one week to several months to complete.

“There are basically two ways we make props,” says Kern. “We mold and cast figures, or we take a Styrofoam-sculpted piece and spray hardcoat on it.” The polyurea or fiberglass fabricated props are less expensive to make than cast props, which can run $12,000 to $15,000 each. Kern Studios began using polyurea in 1992 after searching for a coating that would speed up the manufacturing process and not be inhibited by Louisiana’s high humidity.

“It’s tough and fast,” adds Gonsoulin. “Polyurea costs more than fiberglass, but it is a lot less labor so it is worth paying more for this high-quality material.” Compared to building a mold, spraying polyurea is a breeze, he says. The studio uses Chemline’s Chemthane 7050 fire-retardant polyurea, specially mixed by Chemthane chemist John Cain. “He made us a blend that slows the cure time down so that we can smooth it out,” he adds. “Chemline is good about working with us to give us the blend of polyurea we want.”

The “Guest Abuse” Coating

The decision of what material to use in prop-making depends upon its intended use. If it’s strictly for exterior purposes, Kern Studios will usually opt for cast fiberglass over polyurea or urethane, because they feel that polyurea loses tensile strength in the heat and moisture-sensitive urethane blisters. Fiberglass provides a higher definition, but is more costly, less durable, and less flexible. “With polyurea, we have more ‘give,’ and have the ability to go everywhere,” he says. If there’s going to be what they call “guest abuse” of a prop (i.e., many people will have their hands on it), polyurea will be the material of choice.

For molded props, Kern Studios uses a polyurea-urethane hybrid that vastly increases productivity with its “rapid demolding,” Gonsoulin says. “By the time you put the gun down, you can begin working with it. It only takes two to five minutes before we can remove it from the mold,” he adds. “If there are intricate parts, we leave it in the mold longer. But the majority of the props don’t need that.”

Props that aren’t made with a mold begin with a steel armature to which sculpted foam is added and then cut to the basic shape of the desired figure. Often designers will project a prop-size sketch on to a wall to guide them as they cut the foam into a 3-D figure. A layer of papier-mâché is added to the foam, followed by the polyurea or fiberglass.

If  it’s fiberglass, the fabricators use a Glas-Craft “chopper” gun, which takes the fiberglass resin and a catalyst, such as MEK, and mixes them together at the head with the chopped fiberglass. “The fiberglass process is especially sensitive to the ambient temperature and we use a larger percentage of the catalyst in the winter,” Gonsoulin says. The chopper gun features a rotating set of blades that chops fiberglass into fragments that are 1/8" to 1/2" long. “We then roller it down onto the surface of the mold,” he adds.

Making Faces

On this particular morning in December, Gonsoulin’s job is to spray the Chemline polyurea directly over the foam-sculpted, papier-mâché head and trident-gripping hand of Poseidon, mythological ruler of the undersea world. When the Gusmer proportioning unit is heated to 140°F (60°C) at 3,000 PSI, Gonsoulin puts on a Tyvek suit and a supplied-air organic vapor respirator, and, using a Gusmer GX 400 spray gun, gives Poseidon a face blast of ivory-colored polyurea.

How much mileage will be achieved with the two-component coating usually depends upon the refinement of the foam, but the goal is to use the least amount possible, while still achieving the desired aesthetic effect. “I’m spraying this on 1/8" to 3/16" thick,” observes Gonsoulin. “The hard-to-reach-spots are only 1/8" thick, but I am trying to build the whole prop to 3/16" thick so it won’t crack.” Poseidon’s hardcoat is dry to the touch within seconds, but will be left to cure for a day or so.

At this point, the prop is transported on a pallet from the production studio to the prop shop, where one of the artists will apply vivid primer, color, and distinguishing facial features using acrylic enamels in either a high-gloss or flat finish.

“That’s part of the art – you can create light and shadow with paint,” says Gonsoulin. “If it’s left flat, you can see the artist’s intent. High gloss reflects the highlights. They achieve very different effects.”

The final step is a UV-protective, automotive-type clearcoat to protect the paint from weather damage and scratches. Wearing an MSA Comfo Classic respirator, Gonsoulin’s brother David, who’s also a Kern Studios fabricator, uses a series of sweeping motions to cover a 12-foot, molded fleur-de-lis with Diamond Vogel’s V-Tech high solids polyurethane 4.0 clearcoat, using a compressor-powered Anest Iwata high-volume, low-pressure gun. It quickly takes on a glossy sheen. “If we don’t want a shiny finish, we can add flatteners to give it a matte finish,” he notes. “It’s the same as auto paint.”

If the prop is designated to adorn a float, it gets hauled to another warehouse, where workers assemble the float and mount it to a steel chassis with rubber tires.

A visit behind the scenes at Blaine Kern Studios underscores the fact that prop-making is a genuine collaboration of efforts and that the coatings application process plays an integral role in this unique art form. “In my opinion, fabricators are artists,” Gonsoulin observes, “but most people don’t see just how much of a contribution we make to the final product.”

The next time you attend Mardi Gras or watch the wild celebration on TV, however, you’ll be in on one of the secrets of the business: the creative use of high-performance coatings.

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