Kids/Youth Designs

Upped

Jesse Hinson from The Salvation Army in Atlanta, GA brings us this design for a youth ministry training day. (originally posted May 2016)

From Jesse: So my department travels to Orlando every year to run our event for Youth Ministry training every May. We have about 400 in attendance and this is only my second year in charge of the backdrop. I am on here all the time looking for inspiration and I do not believe I have seen this design before.

Couple of things I have to worry about every year: 1) It has to be portable in a box truck across a state 2) Needs to be cost efficient 3) It has to be completely self-supporting & 4) Needs to be taken down quickly.

Our theme this year was “Measure Up” so I wanted to give the illusion of movement in a static set. There was a Chevron design on here(CSDI) that I liked but to go random wood slats and fit colors to our theme. Material cost: $200, not including the letters or lighting. I painted (4) 2x4x10 & (18) 2x3x8 stud wood then made 8ftx8ft frames with 2ft support legs. These were my simple frame to cover the 16ftx8ft space we had. The supports were the 10 footers and I used 2×3’s to save on a little weight.

Then I used 1x4x8 furring strips for the actual face boards which were eye-balled, measured and put in place. Each one was then taken back off, labeled and paint either Dark Blue, Light Blue or Yellow. When we reached our set-up location it was a matter of attaching the frames together, sorting the boards and then placing them on the frame. To give a 3-D effect, we had 2×2’s cut into (20) 3inch pieces, painted them black and then attached our theme letters to those with Command Velcro strips.

I cannot answer lighting questions as we have an event company do our sound and lighting.

2016BDneardone 2016bluepaint 2016closeup 2016complete 2016design 2016frame 2016painting 2016startconstruct 2016supplies 2016wood

Bellows Light Squares

8 responses to “Upped”

  1. Looks great! Love the lines.

  2. Bob says:

    Looks great! About how many furring strips did you end up using?

    • Jesse says:

      I got 30 to be on the safe side and it came out to be about the right amount. Think I only had a little bit of cut-off leftover. It will be based off of how big an area you need to cover divided by half, since I used one furring strip as my spacer between each row.

  3. Kathleen says:

    Can we borrow the idea? Thank you and God bless!

  4. CHRIS ORR says:

    Great job!!! What approach did you take with the letters?

  5. Hello!

    Thank you for sharing this so much!! I recently constructed something for youth stage, and I was wondering what specific colors you used to paint the backdrop?

    Thank you and God Bless,
    Maurice

  6. Gregg Sanders says:

    Love it.

    What were the cut sizes (lengths) used for the 1×4 furring strips?

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