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Last blog I talked about building a wall with 2×4′s, foam board and drywall mud.When your drywall has cured you are ready to attach it to the frames. Lay it out first, square it up how you want it if your frames aren’t 100% square because lets face it no one is perfect. Then pick how you want to attach it. I just used decking screws to affix it straight no chaser, er washer. You could use a washer but it may pucker more. If you aren’t afraid of needing to disassemble your wall go ahead and plaster over the screw heads.

You’ll see in my sketches how I did the foot support for the walls. The two larger outer walls had feet inset and the center section had no feet but is screwed into the other walls for its support.

Now how do you get that rained on concrete look?

Lots and lots of messy messy paint.

Before I go any further please put down a giant painters tarp (preferably plastic) underneath your entire wall and I don’t mean tuck it in between it’s toes. Do whatever you have to to physically set your wall on the tarp otherwise due to the joints in the wall pieces it spills out and runs down the wood and onto the floor.

I used a 5 gallon bucket a quart of medium grey acrylic base paint and about 3-4 gallons of water. Mix well. Drop some black acrylic paint in for tinting and splattering. I used a roller to mix and do most of the painting.

Most of this is just time and layers. Do a base coat to tinge the wall light grey with the roller and then immediately go create large drips by pressing the roller against the top of the wall and let it streak all over. The messier the better, there is no wrong or right to how you do this. (you will be speckled grey too).

Do two to three coats like this, it will provide the base for your texture and you will begin to see it darken with each coat after it dries.

From here on out you have to feel out how your wall needs to look. I took a spray bottle with black acrylic and water and created darker drip lines down the wall. A rust color was used in the major joints with the black. @jasonwidney drilled holes every so often and did the same with the black and rust colors inside the holes and let it drip back out to create a kind of re-bar rust pattern. After the texture was complete we had students as part of the camp series paint the logo into the wall with a more bold red color.

Have fun, experiment and remember with projection and lighting your options are endless!

Coming up….
The stage design process from projection to lighting to sound.
Pre-sets aren’t just for automation any more, try one on your portable system!
A unique stage element with a unique story: The Bumper Cross.

Alright I’ve got a few things running through my head I need to post up on here. For right now I’m going to give you what is freshest on my mind, camp. This week long rawk out for the LYF Student Ministries happened at camp Tejas and serious planning began just a few months ago. Before I even knew what the theme for this years camp was I already had some killer ideas due to @jasonwidney. Stuff was bouncing around and I had several layout thoughts so i began to put pencil to paper and sketch them out. My initial thoughts were much different than the finished product but I couldn’t be more happy with how things turned out. I’m going to talk about the biggest piece of the camp set which was the wall seen in both the camp videos and on the stage.

Sketches set

So what you see there is a set of sketches. My initial stage design was to have rows of unistrut with coroplast panels offset inside of them kind of like the structure to the left. This would have created a backdrop that could have been lit or projected upon. I also had an idea for a wall from @jasonwidney’s blog to create a faux concrete wall in my head as well. I put both ideas on the table in a student creative meeting and both were accepted well. The deciding factor is that a video concept wanted students painting the logo into a wall. Well…you can’t very easily paint into that coroplast structure so I guess I’m creating a wall! Now how do I do that? The very next picture you’ll see is a wall concept to stagger some of the faux concrete panels to give some depth and texture on the stage. It would have looked pretty sweet (in my mind) but then I began thinking about the logistics of transporting a structure that was 10 ft high, 20ft wide and had the profile of a mac truck carrying a double-wide. So then you get the pictures of the structure I actually built, a flat wall with legs and supports.

Material and wall building set

Building the wall took about a solid week and I started with laying down about 10 gallons of drywall mud across insulation sheathing that I had measured out to take up a 10ft high by 20 ft wide wall (just shy of a 16×9 screen while maintaining standard 2×4 lengths). The amount of panels it took to do that were 2 times – 2.5 full 8ft widths and 1 time 2.5 4ft (cut down) widths. Yes that took 10 gallons of drywall mud and I probably could have slopped it on thicker. I did this with buckets of premixed mud and a 2ft drywall trowel. Be sloppy but a constrained sloppy. Concrete or other textured surfaces are not totally uniform or totally smooth. Thanks to my dad this process only took about 6 hours to cover the spans and about 2 days to fully dry (yes this process takes time).

Next I built the frame sections, two 10×8 sections and one 10×4 section that the drywall panels would be fixed to. Cross braces made the large frame more stable. If you’re not planning on moving it to much or supporting it from some other means then you may not need it, but i’d suggest it just for peace of mind. Put at least one cross support in the 8×10 to give your panels support I might suggest if you’re spanning wider to put in more, or do both horizontal and vertical supports. Again I was going for the lightest structure I could manage. Don’t forget as you’re cutting the wood, your measurement should be from outside to outside all the way around, take into consideration the actual width of your 2×4 for accurate size. Otherwise when you place your panels on you’re going to either end up with to much wood showing, or to much foam hanging over. Oh yeah when you’re purchasing 2×4′s  (Which is what i built my structure out of) buy premium wood if you can and try and buy the straightest pieces otherwise making it square is a nightmare. Use safety when you cut the wood, level your saw if you can to get straight cuts, and never saw alone…if your hand goes missing it’s mighty hard to dial 911.

That concludes blog post one. I’m going to write these in a series over the next week or so because there is so much detail. I’ll explain the painting process for you in the next blog.