Grown

Kim McLennan, Brad Hicks, and Tom Lyons from Rolling Hills Covenant Church in Rolling Hills, CA brings us this vine/tree stage design.

From Kim: Our sermon series for three months was “People of the Book” Focusing on how the Word is so important: It is the soul’s food, strength, hope, refuge, direction, life. That without the word we can not grow. We must abide in Jesus with the word.

With that in mind we wanted something that portrayed life and growth. The vine design we came up with also gave us flexibility to project each weeks theme on the leaves. Brad Hicks as the artist did a fantastic job with the vines and he and Tom Lyons worked great as a team cutting it out, painting it and then installing it for us. Again, I am so grateful for teams of creative people at our church. I love what I do because they too love what they do!

We started with the vine sketch and used the grid method to enlarge it for our stage.

We used 1/4 in plywood and projected the vine them on the boards and then cut them out. they were panted a light off white so they would take LED color well. On site we screwed them together with 1×1 on the back to support them to minimize the wood warping. We did this design in our two teaching rooms the main sanctuary and the smaller multipurpose room.

Cost: We spent about $350 on materials and it took about 24 hours to build it.

For lighting the vines:

We used a combination of LED lights at the top and front to create a “water color” type effect. We also utilized some front lights with gobos to add a bit of texture. In addition to the lighting, we used a front mounted projector to project words on a few of the “leaves”. Projecting the words allowed us to change them each week and reinforce the preaching themes.