Giant Card Letters - Comic Decorated

Welcome to my first Instructable of 2017, granted been a while but being super busy has taken me away from my projects..

My better half and I have jusy recently moved house *YAY* and now the madness has settles and she is occupied with decorating I thought Id get busy decorating our 3rd bedroom..........my man cave ./ 3rd old nephews room when he stays over.

Oddly enough in a fashion that I fear will come back to bite me she has given me free reign. I still look over my shoulder when I think about it.

Anyway as you can imagen we have LOADS of cardboard boxes.....LOADS so I wanted to make some of the giant letters people have these days decorating rooms, walls and doors.

I'm sure most of you are no stranger to this but here is how I did ours.........

This is what you will need for this task......

1. Card and lots of it, various sizes and thicknesses help.
2. Tape - Any works, I found masking tape and duck tape best
3. scissors and/or craft knife
4. pencil or pen possibly a ruler
5. Decoration ( optional and varies on what end result you want - I choose comics....no surprise there )

The idea, now I did want to go with POW and BIFF but decided on just POW for the time being as I went bigger than expected, which leads me to my first point.....

Things you need to consider :

Your word - seems simple but decide on the word, how complex it is and do you have enough card

Size - again do you have enough card and where will it go when complete

When your sure on these you can get your large bits of card and draw your letters, ( remember you will need x2 of each word drawn ) plus the "gaps" and "edges"

When happy and all letters are the same size you can start to cut

So you can see from the pic I did do this on a huge scale before getting too far was told to stop and go smaller LOL

Anyway Now you have your front and back templates for the word

x2 P's

x2 O's

and x2 W's you can start to figure out how thick you want the letter to be,

I found 1 1/2 or 2 inches to be enough as too think and they wouldn't look right but I went for roughly half the thickness of the letters but this is up to you, its trial and error.

I started by selecting my thickness and cutting loads of identical strips to go between the front and back of the letters.

Using tape I started at one side and stuck the middle section to the front then bending the strip to the shape continuing to tape down, then repeating for the back and securing together with duck tape. Duck tape works woncers to secure the card and hold it tight as well as smooth over any rough edges. ready for decoration later.

TIP when doing letters with right-angle edges and hole in I found it better to start here first

When this process is complete more to the next piece and repeat..........

ADDITIONAL TIP When finished trimming the edges with scissors or a craft knife can really make the difference but don't go too mad and SAFTEY FIRST

Now if you are careful and take your time these will be ideal to decorate, and with a little patience can look better if not as good as store brought blank versions. As you can see from the Pic I (well the GF) took the time to wrap one of the W's ( granted up the wrong way in the pic ) in brown packing paper and the other in comic paper / some old pages from an salvageable comic book.

The great thing about these you can decorate any way you want, Paint, wrap paper, glue fabric, wrap wool the sky is the limit......even add LEDs as the other half pointed out.

BUT If you want to paint your card I would recommend paper mache to make them stronger, make the colours bolder and avoid the chances of them getting wet and going soggy.

I decided to try wrapping them, like you would with any Christmas present or gift, to do this I simply got the pages from the comic that had fallen to pieces and stuck them together to form a sheet, then took the tile to wrap them up cutting edges to keep them as crisp as possible

Once dry you are free to display there,

Credit to my girlfiend who took the great pictures of the finished result and who finally caved in and let me make a Mr & Mrs version, I fear they will be decorated differently soon tho lol

Enjoy and hope you all like,

Remember to vote in the competition too :)