Making a Leap Day Photo Prop with Signal the Frog™
by Islander1988
Posted on 2016-02-28 at 7:38 PM
On Monday, like many people, I'll be hosting a Leap Day event (there are 8 in my province alone). To add a little fun to the evening, I decided to make a photo prop, and who makes more sense to have at a "leap" day event than Signal™?
I located a frame for my prop (which I'll show later) and it was about twice as tall as it was wide. I found
different pictures of Signal online, downloaded a few, and a tall narrow one looked like it would suit my purpose.
The image was small though, and I knew if I blew it up to poster size the quality may not be great. So, I hauled him into Inkscape (a free vector drawing program I use a lot) and began to trace the image.
With some work, I had recreated as much of him as I needed for my poster. Now, I had a vector version of Signal I could scale to any size without losing quality.
Next, I drew a rectangle the actual size of my frame. I then scaled my drawing to fit in the middle and added my text.
My frame was about 32" high and 16" across. I figured that if I printed Signal out on 8.5" x 11" Letter sized paper, he'd be two sheets wide and three high with a bit of overlap to make assembly easier. I could move my drawing over my printable area and print out the sections.
Behold, Signal ready for assembly!
As always, there was a small white border on the outside of the sheets since it's usual for printers not to print right to the edge. I chose on each overlap which sheet would go on top and trimmed off the white edge where needed (the under sheet didn't need to be trimmed on that edge since it would be covered).
After cutting out the face, the pieces of Signal were ready to be taped together.
Since I had printed out the image on normal paper, it needed to be mounted on a frame to be rigid enough for people to hold for photos. You could make a wooden frame, but I used the aluminum frame from an old window screen. Paper was cut to size and taped to it.
Here is the assembled Signal and the back of the papered screen.
On the front of the frame I positioned Signal, marked the rough area where the face opening was, and then cut it out (with some buffer) while it was easy to do before Signal was attached.
With the face hole made, it was time to position my image and tape it in place. I used enough tape to hold it, but not so much that Signal would be hard to remove from the background paper if I want to use the covered frame for another prop in the future.
There you have it. Signal™ is ready for Leap Day!