A Little Depth

Curtis Suuppi from The Rising Christian Church in Lapeer, MI brings us this cool Christmas wall.

From Curtis: I have the back wall of our stage as a template in my design software and I start by drawing and designing artwork on the stage and getting measurements for materials. Paint is relatively cheap so we end up painting our designs on this back wall and then when we’re finished we coat it with black paint and begin again.

For Christmas we wanted to emphasize the contrast of a weary world rejoicing. I found sermon series artwork with a white background and some penciled in trees along the bottom. I changed it up quite a bit sticking with similar styles of text.

Once we had the design we wanted to figure out how to make “Rejoices” pop. So we grabbed a projector and thew the design on the wall so it was to size. Using craft paper, we outlined the letters to size and transferred them to some melamine board from Home Depot. Used a jigsaw to cut them out, primed and painted with a metallic wall paint. Finally we painted a black stroke around the edges.

To mount the letters to the wall, we cut 3″ 2×4 blocks, painted them black and screwed them into the wall with 4″ drywall screws and wall anchors. We cut and glued cheap LED strip lights from Amazon to the backs and soldered them all together. Then we turned the projector on again, put industrial strength velcro on the blocks mounted to the wall and lined up the letters with the image being projected on the wall. I used small wire nuts to connect the letters together and then hid the wires taping them to the back of the letters with some duct tape. And finished it up by painting any exposed wires black.

The stars and scrollwork is the same gold we used on the letters and the trees were various shades of gray paint.

We lit it with 4 blue ADJ LED throwing the blue on the wall and then I had some LED black lights used on a previous project that gives a purple hue to the trees at the base of the wall. Up top, we have 2 cheap par cans with 2 Philipps Hue flood bulbs that can change from cool white to a super warm gold. I have them at about 75% brightness on the warmest light and that really helped the stars up top pop off the wall.

All in all we spent approximately $200 on this project though we had some of the supplies on hand. The metallic gold paint was about $48/gallon and the grays were around $15 per quart. We used about 30ft of LED strip lights that cost us about $23 and used bell wire to solder them together which was about $10. The melamine board was about $8 and the velcro was $25.