Making wallpaper

[paintcab]

I know I’ve heard of scenic’s making wallpaper out of heavy weight kraft or maybe bogus paper??? We are doing a hyper realistic show with what needs to be painted wallpaper. The pattern will be forced perspective. I’d like to be able to get that sense of seams in wallpaper. I’d appreciate any successful techniques for making wallpaper I could look into. Thanks very much in advance.

Carrie

McCarter Theatre, Princeton

[Rachael Claxton]

I love using matte scrim vinyl for wallpaper (in addition to a bunch of other things). You can run in through the plotter and print out either a portion or all of your design if you want, or you can just paint right on it with scenic paint. It also has a nice thickness to it which would help you with showing the seams, and will totally adhere with wallpaper paste or glue. Here’s the link to the stuff that I use all the time:

https://www.plotterpaper.com/water-resistant-15-mil-scrim-vinyl-42-x-40-1-roll-90042040/

Good luck!

[paintcab]

So we did end up using vinyl scrim for the wall paper. Our plotter is only 36″ so we had to go with the 15mm thickness. It took paint well. Two small problems occurred, tho. The white of the paper was actually a little different per batch so plan accordingly. We could not get this thickness to stick with just white glue. We ended up painting all the backs of with green glue and allowing that to dry. That gave the vinyl enough tooth to grab onto the white glued surface. So this was a very successful method. Letting CAD do the layout for us was a big time saver.

Thanks Rachel Claxton!

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