How to make a cardboard stand up of someone!

So you wanna make a cardboard stand up of someone?

Well with a few hours and a few bucks you can make one.

Now I just have a standup of my brother but imagine all the possibilities. Who will be the first to make a cardboard stand up all the furniture in their friends living room. Take a picture of the living room as is. Remove all furniture. Install cardboard stand ups in their respective places!

There are really two, well maybe three approaches to making a cardboard stand up.

First you can have someone make one for you.
http://www.lifesizegreetings.com/gallery.htm
http://www.partypop.com/Vendors/4064885.htm
http://www.airbornevisuals.com/popdisplays/custom-standups/life-size-cutout.html

Prices for a 6'4 figure are about $165.00 not including shipping.

A cheaper approach calls for taking the photo and breaking up into desktop printer sized parts.

http://www.blockposters.com/

This would only cost the ink and paper. Ultra cheap if you have a decent printer and can deal with some lines.

I wanted something a little more.
I had a life size photo of my brother printed at Kinkos and I mounted it to the cardboard myself. Cost about 125.00

Keep in mind they charge by the square foot. Smaller person, smaller print cost. Cost to print 6'4 brother came to $110.00 with 10% student discount. About 15.00 for foamcore + gluesticks.

Step 1 Getting your image.

Get your hands on the largest megapixel camera you can.
The larger the megapixel the better the printed image will be.

I recommend at least a 7 megapixel camera. They are pretty common now. You can rent a 12 megapixel camera at some camera rental stores.
The next step involves enlarging the photo, a smaller megapixel will give you pixelation and a higher megapixel won't be affected as much.

Picture below is what we want to avoid. This would be a 4 megapixel photo blown up to life size.

Comments

[Intersection]

Nice instructable! We did cutouts of ourselves and sent them to burning man because my wife was 9 months pregnant and we couldn't go. The best was that the foam core only comes in 5 foot long pieces so I came out freakishly short which made it even more ridiculous. We printed it on waterproof sticky-backed vinyl - I think it was about $4 a square foot. I flipped one of the images so they could print next to each other so the final thing only was about 4x5 so it only cost about $80 to do two people. The 19 year old mormon kid at the checkout of the print place was totally embarrassed when my wife showed up to get the printout - I gues he'd never seen a pregnant lady in a stripper costume before. ;)

[siashvili]

hi:) i want to do the stand ins its nearly same as this ones, but i dont know whats the material and where to bye it, i read this- foem but i cant translate it in my language:( and can u halp me with giving me the link where i can find the foem.or give me the picturi of the foem.tnx

[Intersection]

This is foam core:
http://www.uline.com/BL_870/Foam-Core-Board?Pricode=wm9&gclid=CO7IqN2Wn6kCFR1sgwodAVGZuQ

wikiepdia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foamcore

[shop dweller]

(removed by author or community request)

[ibeus]

We already make these at advancedgraphics.com. WE have the lisence and manufacture them. Email me [e-mail]. I'll give you our wholesale price

[bustedit]

i think u can buy elvis n monroe

[fwjs28]

XD....

[ibeus]

If anyone wants a Custom Standup for wholesale, $99.99 I work for advanced graphics, who are the manufacturers for all the standups. You can send me a photo to [e-mail] or call us 801-499-5000 ask for Isaac. The more you buy the more I can save you. If your a business that's wants to sell custom standups or our stock standups ie Justin Beiber, Lil Wayne, Star Wars, ect. Call or email me for prices. We also can make a WallJammer (sticky back wall graphics) if you'd rather have that than a stand up. Hope this helps!

[AscentVIP]

Thanks for the hint of Kinkos. Great ideas here! Though I still plan to have my cutouts found by a concierge service

http://www.ascentvip.com

[jjones444]

You can make a cardboard cutout of yourself or someone you know?! haha, this is crazy. I'm pretty sure if I recognized the face on the standup it would scare me even more than a normal standup would. If I ever make one, I'm definitely going to video record people's reactions. The site /www.videodemoreels.com specializes in making your own videos.

[Gramjen]

Having a cardboard cutout of yourself could come in really useful. Picture it, instead of spending hours standing in a line at a wedding reception you could fake your guests out with a cutout of yourself. Check out www.fairygodmothersbridal.com

[joecast40]

Hi all, found a great site for your wedding needs check it out at http://charlottewedding.org

[cojo]

FREAKY!!!!!!!!!!! I have one of my sister, and I caught it on fire, it looked so real!!!!

[Intersection]

You can save time by not isolating the image -- since they will probably print it square anyways, you can just cut out around the figure after it is stuck on the board.

[Chuck P.]

nice thinking

[MisterHay]

My wife's brother did this for his wedding. Two people that were to be in the wedding party were not able to make it back from South Africa... but there are life-sized replicas of them in the wedding photos. I think it cost them a little more than the DIY way though.

[mikal]

What happened in South Africa? It sounds a bit morbid still having the replicas around for the photos.

[MisterHay]

They weren't able to make it back from South Africa in time for the wedding for work-related reasons, they were (and are) fine though.

[gary_7vn]

Freaky city.. I just did one of these. I used hardboard/masonite because they had to be waterproofed and able to stand up in the wind outdoors. As for glue, goto to your local art store and buy the repositionable stuff. You can correct mistakes for up to 10 minutes. To fix the bubbles next time use a special roller also from the art store, it will flatten efficiently. I cut out the outline first then traced it on the masonite. I cut it with a moto tool cutter. I then sanded the edges to refine, then I glued on the cut-out figures using the repo glue. Then rolled out the bubbles. Worked great.

[wetpaint]

In the long run it is cheaper and better quality if you have someone make them, i make them every day. you can make them from any picture or art work and we even do those ones of charachters with the face missing to get a picture taken with it. It is more reasonable then you would think to get a fun cutout for a party or whatever occassion. check us out.

Cardboard Standees
Headless Cutouts

[qwerty90210]

Instead of renting a camera just but one from walmart then return it. Good way to build your friends trust by borrowing and paying them back an hour later LOL

[Brennn10]

This is pretty good. Nice Instructable!

[Llewner]

A plotter draws single lines with a pen mounted to a single axis arm while the paper is moved back and forth under it. A vinyl cutting plotter does the same thing, but with a knife instead of a pen. A digital printer it just that, a big printer. I run all three for a living, and make some of these stand-ups as well. Though we digitally print on self adhesive vinyl, over-laminate it, and mount it to a piece of CNC router cut 6mm sintra with aluminum angle bracing.

[eviloverlord]

A cardboard chav - just what every home needs. Seriously though - nice instructable.

[BurningApple]

This is kickass. I'm gonna make my mom one for her birthday.

[Guillaume]

This could be done for less than 10 bucks, and canadian bucks.
First, foamcore is sorta hard, but you can for free use:
- double corrugated cardboard as used to pack refrigerator and large appliance. This could be dumpster dived anywhere, and might be found over 5-6 feet tall, and is probably tougher than any foamcore around
- glued together simple corugated cardboard. You can use small pieces of cardboard with this trick, since you'll probably to use three layers of it, so where there will be joints, there will be also 2 thick cardboard pieces. Note that two pieces of cardboard glued together are tougher than 2 pieces of cardboard one over the other.

For printing, here are the local cost, and how I would do it. If you really need photorealism, I would go with quality material, and use rubber cement, and color 8.5*11 pieces of paper. If you calculate the margin of the printer at the copy store which are smaller than 1/4 inch, you might make something 7 feet 4 (88 inches (which is 11 * 8, 8 being the printable area on the width size of standard paper)) inches by 3 feet and 6 (42 inches (which is 4 * 10.5, 10.5 being the printable area on the length size of standard paper)) by using
4 X11 = 44 standard color prints, which would costs in my area 37.40$ + taxes. Which is way less expensive. More, you can just choose to no print the unused sheets (those around the head for example). You can get printed in a 44 pages pdf by using illustrator (using tile options in the printing menu). Usually, for 2 or 3 bucks, the local copy store will use their evil cut machine to cut out the unprinted zones of the paper, so you won't have to cut them by yourself.

It's still expensive, if you don't really need photorealism, so here's two other plans:
- Use illustrator, and traces the main shapes in black, to get something that looks like the original, like a stencil. This could be long if you never used illustrator, but it's workable. Print black and white. This is not uber cool, but you're price fell down to:
44 * 0.07 = 3.08. (price from the copy store)
- If you are sorta proficient in illustrator, you might think about using 3-4 colors or more. Just finish you're work in color, and change back the color info to some writings (like this zone is #ff0000). Use crappy acrylic paint and you got some really awesome painting of someone, for probably 5 more bucks (especially if you got big pots of primary colors hanging around). With that trick you can forgot rubber cement and just wheat paste the paper down to the cardboard. Total cost: 5 + 3.08 = 8.08 bucks.

[julesandflossy]

That is very cool, what a funky gift idea. It has all sorts of other possibilities too, eg security, behind one of those slightly transparent curtains looking out of a window in an empty house, or a house where a woman lives alone; as a prop in a film or family photo if your brother is away; as a clothes hanger, at the end of the day when you're tired, although could need a stronger stand on the back.... the mind boggles.

[robomaniac]

That is SO COOL!!! I could make the poster move with servo and everything! Imagine your gilfriend entering your room one night... MUWAHAHAHAHAA! Poke a hole in the body and add a camera to film people reaction! thanks! Jerome

[gptau]

for free, you can use "posteriza" a great software:
http://www.posteriza.com/es/index.php?lang=en_US

[cryptopath]

This is a really cool idea, but I had no idea it would cost $100 to make... If only printing was cheaper. I guess it would be much cheaper if one just made a silhouette of a person. But that's nowhere near as cool. Anyways, I just wanted to show a really amusing ad that showed up when I browsed this page. It was placed right underneath the demonstration of pixelation due to enlarging a photo...

[BrianH]

Sounds like a fun project! - I'm sure it gets a lot of laughs. One question... Why not try cutting out the white area between the legs? It might weaken the structure, but you could then reinforce the legs on the back. Since you're wearing a baggy pair of jeans the legs are not extremely thin.

[!Andrew_Modder!]

cool, but damn, doesnt that like run your ink cartrages down all the way!?? lol

[FreakCitySF]

Printed it up at Kinkos!

[!Andrew_Modder!]

oh! yeah! lol just get a printer that for sure full of ink!

[un_owen]

Nice! You could try to use Rasterbator (large images into several sheets of paper and prints them out as dots) instead of Block posters, which would save some ink but only work if people were looking from far away. A plotter is a printer that basically has a pen and literally draws the image. I would suspect they are primarily used for drafting (architectural, electrical board layouts, etc). It wouldn't really be helpful in this case.

[oinkoinkzoopals]

i once bought one of these at a yard sale for 2 bucks and used it as a bb gun target. it was a guy from the papparazi movie

[rocketbat]

LOL! GREAT INSTRCTABLE! ooooh, imagine the possibilities!

[brianf25]

Fun project. I might have to try that sometime. It could make for an interesting gift idea.