Star Wars: Rebels Vs. Empire Glowing Emblems

Today we'll build a cheap, simple and quick wall fixture with Star Wars motives on them! These are surprisingly easy to make, and there are really endless opportunities as for what you can make. They make great decorations for your wall, or maybe as a gift for a friend or relative?

Materials:

• Canvas
• Print of a chosen motive
• LED-strip
• Acrylic paint + clear coat spray
• Wire + power plug

Tools needed:

• Scissors
• X-acto knife / scalpel
• Paintbrush + pencil
• Soldering iron
• Hot glue gun

Step 1: Print and Cut Out a Motive

The first thing we have to do is to print out a motive we like in a proper size for the canvas we're going to use. The canvas frame we'll use here is 25x25 cm, with a 2,5 cm thick wooden frame. We'll need a 1 cm border on the inside to cover the LED-strip, so we'll make sure to print out the circular logos so that they'll fit perfectly (18 cm width). Otherwise, we could have drawn a cool motive by hand, or made some geometric pattern with tape, etc. There are tons of possibilities!

Step 2: Drawing on and Cutting Out the Pattern

We'll continue by drawing on the 1 cm border inside the frame, and adjust the pattern so that it's centered. We don't really have to be very accurate when drawing the lines here, as it's the back side and it won't be visible in the end anyway. After that, we can just cut out the pattern with a scalpel.

Step 3: Painting the Canvas

Before we continue, we'll secure the back with some masking tape. This is just to make sure that the corners we've cut out won't bend when we begin to paint it, as the acrylic paint can weigh it down a bit. We're just going to use regular, cheap acrylic paint. When it's all properly covered, we're going to cover it with some clear coat. This is going to strengthen the structure a bit, because there are some parts of the design we're using that's likely to bend over time. The clear coat will prevent that.

Step 4: Adding a Power Plug

We could've stopped at the previous step, and hung it on the wall and it would look really cool. But, we're taking it one step further by adding some LED-strips inside the frames. We'll add a power plug to the bottom of the frame, so that we can power our LED-strip. Before adding it to the frame, we'll solder on two wires to the plug, and add a shrinking tube to the outside for some protection. Then we just have to drill a hole big enough for the plug to fit perfectly through, and push it in.

Step 5: Soldering the LED-strip

Finally, we just have to hook up the power plug to the LED-strip. Using hot glue, we'll attach the LED-strip around the whole inside of the frame. We're trying to glue it as close to the front as possible, just so that the LEDs will be covered up as well as we can.

Step 6: Final Thoughts

Then it's basically finished!

It wasn't exactly easy to get a good picture of the frames to be honest. The black frame with the Empire logo looks really cool, but I should've painted the Rebels frame black too. I painted it white, and so some of the light shines through. Maybe if I had used more paint, it would've been lees see-through. But overall, I think it looks awesome on the wall!

As I said, there are really so many opportunities with this project. By painting the frames, adding colourful paper to the backside, adding lights, playing around with different patterns and sizes etc. there are so many variations you can create.

Hope you enjoyed this project! If you did, maybe you'll enjoy some of our other projects we've posted on our YouTube channel?

Until next time!