Christmas in Hawaii

Jeremy Napier from Hope Chapel in Kihei, Hawaii brings us this travel poster stage design.

From Jeremy: We wanted to develop a design that encapsulated celebrating Christmas in Hawaii using a 40’s style travel poster vibe. The wall of white shiplap is 4’x8′ sheets of 1/2″ plywood ripped to about 10″ wide and makes for the perfect “organic” backdrop, providing texture and great light reflection. The sun, mountain, beach and trees are all made from 4’x8′ sheets of 2″ foam board found at your local big box store for about $40 a sheet. Foam board is great because it’s light weight, rigid and if it falls it’s not going to hurt someone.

First, we built a short wall made of 2’x4’s and attached the foam board to the 2×4 wall. *Building tip, when working with foam, the only thing that really works for attaching foam to a surface is a can of spray foam…the stuff used to fill cracks/gaps in walls. Spray foam is incredibly sticky and pliable when first applied but dries rock hard and is easy to cut/shape with a knife, just be aware that it does expand as it dries. Next, we used (2) 4’x8′ foam boards laying side by side (making an 8’x8′ sheet) and drew the circle of the sun (one half circle on each 4×8 sheet) and attached the 2 sheets together using a 2’x’4 frame in the shape of a cross and the spray foam. The mountain was cut from a sheet of foam and placed sitting on top of the wall and anchored with 2’x4’s and spray foam. Next, the trees were cut from 2 sheets of foam each, and connected using a scrap piece of foam about 1′ wide and 4′ long, bridging the gap between the 2 vertical pieces and attached using the spray foam…seriously, it’s amazing how strong that stuff is!

The various stage pieces are all slightly off-set front to back and lights placed in between the elements so that it creates a sense of depth for each piece and allows for LED colors to be independent without bleed-over.

Overall cost was around $400 between foam, 2×4’s and paint.