What are poster projects?


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What are poster projects?

These projects are pre-painted -- all you have to do is glue them to the material of your choice, usually plywood, cut them out, waterproof them, and set up as a display.

Posters are printed on a heavy duty paper which is already somewhat water resistant. The posters are to be glued to 1/4" to 3/4" plywood and then sealed with a weather proof sealer. The instructions you receive with the poster pack will explain all this in detail. Below, you will find a quick outline of the process of making a poster display project and also some helpful and important tips to keep in mind.

Important tips & reminders about poster projects:

When the posters arrive, lay them on a flat surface, put your plywood sheets on top of the unfolded posters and lay some weight on the plywood. This will help flatten the posters out a bit -- a few wrinkles is normal.

Before you begin to glue your posters to your wood, and this is VERY important, make sure you have coated your wood with a primer or glue FIRST! If the wood is not sealed with something before you begin gluing the posters to the wood, the posters will wrinkle up as the wood absorbs the glue...and you do not want that.

Once the wood is sealed, begin gluing the posters to your wood. You may need to thin the glue you have chosen with a bit of water in order to get a good spread. You should use a water-based or resin-based glue. Put some glue on the wood as well as on the posters, then stick them together. Have a damp cloth handy to smooth the posters out with.

Some wrinkles in the posters are to be expected, but these can be solved by slitting them with a razor blade and overlapping the cut edges.

Once the posters are glued down, wait 24 hours, then begin to cut them out using a jig saw or one of the newer rotary style hand saws. Just cut around the lines of the pre-painted characters. The saw will cut right through the paper and the wood. Now your getting somewhere!

Next is the weather coating. You want to use a water based polyeurethane or other clear sealer. Regardless of which brand or type of sealer you choose, you'll want to test it on a small portion of just one character before applying it to the entire poster set! Some weather coats will turn the posters green or yellow. Slight discoloration is sometimes unavoidable, but is usually not noticeable from the street -- where they're mostly viewed from. The weather coating is not 100% necessary, as the paper is somewhat resistant to weather already...but we think it is very advisable and will prolong the life of your posters.

After you've put on at least two coats of weather coating, it's time to mount your characters to the earth. We're not going to go into this in detail here. There are so many methods of doing this, it's unreal. You can do metal rods driven into the ground, wooden stands mounted to the back of the characters, wooden platforms that the characters adhere to...the list goes on. Take a trip to the hardware store and use your imagination.

As always, feel free to email me questions or call by Contacting Us...

Click here to take a look at our Holiday Decorations where you can find links to all of our poster projects.