Practicing for kids' school projects

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Project: 10 commandments tablets for church props.
Time: these last few weeks have been pretty busy with freelance work, so of course I left everything for Saturday afternoon and had to take them on Sunday.

Initially I was going to see what we had for Halloween tombstone props and try to manipulate them. But the items we had were terribly small, so I needed to start from scratch. Ben found this video as inspiration. I watched over parts of the instructions and made a quick trip to Lowe's.

The guy at Lowe's cut the 4'x8' (smallest size) insulation for me so it would fit in the car. While he worked on that, we looked at spray paint and found this awesome textured paint.

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The insulation was very easy to cut with a utility knife. I told the guy at Lowe's not to go to too much trouble measuring. I eye-balled one of the pieces to cut it in half and then created the imperfect curves quickly. More time-consuming was removing the layer of paper to reveal the insulation texture.

Click on photo to see more detail and read tip

There was just enough paint to cover the two tablets. Next: the writing. I found images of the props from the movie "The Ten Commandments." I am slowly learning how to take shortcuts and not sweat over every detail. These tablets will not be viewed close-up, so while I took some time on the lettering, I did not let myself go crazy over every stroke. After the white paint, I added some black edges to create a little depth and readability.

After a few weeks and three projects that were graphic design-heavy, it was fun to get away from the computer and enjoy some arts and crafts time. These tablets will be up the next few weeks, as every week a new symbol/covenant is added.

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