I’ve been taking a lot of photos for my Star Wednesday posts, and decided the other day that I would like to set up a clutter-free area where I could take those pictures. It wouldn’t have to be large or permanent — just a small place where I could take clear pictures of my Star Wars items. On the backs of the early vintage action figure cards, each figure appeared in their own little colored box. I decided that this was the look I wanted to emulate.

I can’t remember if I read about it, saw it, or just figured it out on my own, but somehow at some point it came to me that you could recreate this look with a single sheet of poster board. By placing the poster board flat on a table and then bending the back up at a 90 degree angle, the color runs together and you get that look.

I bought a sheet of poster board from Dollar Tree for 50 cents, placed it on a metal chair, and placed a figure on top of it. Then I took a picture of it with my phone.

Here’s the same shot from a bit further away:

The one thing I hadn’t anticipated was the shadow cast by the figure. Each of these pictures were taken under terrible lighting conditions (LED bulbs inside a ceiling fan’s light fixture). I may need to relocate closer to a window or use another piece of poster board to reflect some of the light.

Based on the results of my trial run I went back and bought three more sheets of poster board: blue, green, and orange.

The solid colors also make it pretty easy to cut out the backgrounds and drop different ones in.

I’ll need to do a little work to clean up the shadows, but other than that I think this will work!