Emilio Ruiz del Rio. Fortunata y Jacinta TVseries 1979.

Today’s article is dedicated to Spanish artist Emilio Ruiz del Río. He started to work on films at 1942 as scenic painter and soon became assistant of art director and glass painter Enrique Salvá. Emilio specialized in camera glass painting and cut-out paintings, a variant of the glass shot technique in which he cut out the painted element on a thin aluminium sheet, avoiding the glass reflections and the fragility and difficulty of moving with huge glass sheets.  During the sixties and seventies, he started to add some three-dimensional  elements to his paintings, and in the eighties he mastered the foreground miniatures technique on films like Conan (1982) or Dune(1984). He made wide use of both techniques, sometimes mixed until his death in 2007.

Emilio Ruiz(on the left) during the filming of one of his cut-out paintings. 

For the Spanish TV series Fortunata y Jacinta (1979), he was recruited to make some in-camera tricks to enhance the sets. 

 On that occasion, he used the technique of aluminium cut-out paintings.

 This TV series recreates 19th-century Madrid with a lot of authenticity. That means the miniature paintings should be invisible, and they were.

The Emilio’s paintings matched perfectly the sets making it impossible to detect the trick.