Around a month ago I was interested in offering to take some photos with a backdrop. I decided to go with the theme of the 4th of July, and with that theme in mind I thought that It would be cool to make a giant American flag as a prop. This project took a lot longer than we thought it would, but we did manage to finish it around a week before the July 4th Holiday.
We started our project by purchasing some wood planks, they were cut to around 4 by 5 feet. We bought 13 of them, not pictured, to represent the 13 stripes on the flag. I painted 6 of them halfway, and then the rest I painted entirely white.
I then tackled the planks that needed to be painted red, I used some painters tape in order to get a straight line. As you may have noticed, we also started laying down blue stars, which we used as stencils for when we painted in the blue part of the flag.
Once all of the planks were painted the correct colors we lined them all up together. We used another piece of wood underneath it in order to give it some sturdiness. This also made it super heavy… We glued the pieces of wood onto the other piece of wood with wood glue.
Now for the most frustrating part! After using a star shaped paper cutter to cut out 50 stars we had to align them correctly on the flag. This was not easy at all! We found that if we aligned them diagonally they were a bit easier to line up. After we got the stars in the right positions we taped them down so they wouldn’t move on us.
After placing all of the stars I painted a few layers of blue paint over that area, trying my best not to get any paint under them. This of course didn’t happen and we had to fix them later… After the paint dried we were able to peel the stars off and fix the ones that got a little messed up when painting.
After this the flag was finally finished, and it was able to be used for 4th of July photos. Here is a photo of my final backdrop using the flag that we made! It was definitely a large project, but in the end it turned out to be perfect for how we planned to use it!
