Rock Walls for Theater

The rock wall above was create by Brian McGuire of Parkview Baptist Church in Monroe, LA.

One way to make rock wall like the one pictured above is by cutting "rocks" out of foam board and attaching them to a larger sheet of foam board or wood (possibly even sturdy cardboard), and then painting them in shades of gray or brown. Some paints, especially spray paints, will eat away at foam, so you will want to test your paint out before applying to a large area. However, you can also use this property to make foam board rock without having to do any cutting or glueing. You can paint around where you want rocks to be, which creates a a grout like indentation when the paint eats away at the rock. Then you can paint the rocks that are left with non-eroding paint. Make sure to be in a well ventilated place when you do this, as the fumes can be harmful.

Foam board too expensive? You can use packaging foam, foam from ready for the trash can foam coolers, etc. Broken up, painted, and attached to a backing they can look great!

The rock wall above was created for VBS at the First Baptist Church in Tuscola, TX.

It's amazing to think that the wall above was made with just paper, paint, and cardboard. The stones were made by cutting out different rounded shapes from scratch paper, crumpling them up, unfolding them, and spraying them with stone paint, gray paint and black paint. These were then stapled into the cardboard structure (made from refrigerator boxes!)

You can make a rock wall using commercial party paper. The house above is made this way (though the rock around the door is foam board, made with the spray paint grout method described above). This is probably the quickest and easiest way to make a wall, though less three dimensional than some other methods.

Picture above provided by Dawn Gahan of The Gahan Girls.

Sometimes it helps to have scenery on wheels--and wood is a good choice for its sturdiness in this case. You can see more pictures of this wall and it's matching pair at The Gahan Girls or view plans for it here. The plans don't include the wheel base, but she did tell me that the wheels are heavy duty casters.

This house on wheels shows that sometimes all you need is a few well-painted stones to create the suggestion of a stone wall...but of course, you could use any of the other methods mentioned above to fill it with more stones.