Make Your Own Stage Props!

This edition of “Stage Presents” isn’t about your performing techniques, it’s about what surrounds you while you’re performing. If you’re doing a play at school, or putting on your own production with friends, you don’t want to have to spend a lot of money. Guess what? You can make all sorts of props for little or no money — and it’s a lot of fun, too! All you need is imagination and ingenuity. (Ingenuity is the clever ideas that make what you imagine into reality.)

It’s amazing the things you can make from cardboard, or paper, or old newspapers… things that would otherwise be put in to the recycle bin, you can recycle into all kinds of things for your play.

Cardboard boxes are a great place to start. Have you ever seen the picture book Not a Box? In it, the rabbit imagines his ordinary cardboard box to be all sorts of things. You don’t have to rely on the audience imagining the right purpose for your cardboard box prop, though. Cardboard boxes are just ASKING to be turned into something else. For a play I was in quite a few years ago, I made a computer out of a cardboard box. It looks pretty old fashioned now, but it was recognizable as a computer then!

What can you think of that could be made from a cardboard box? Tell me about it in the comments!

You can also make scenery and props from paper! Blue tissue paper makes great ocean waves. You can even make fish and other sea creatures to swim through the waves — and from brown paper you can make a treasure chest dripping with fake jewels.

Think about the sorts of backdrops you could create!

You can find other projects online — I found this link that shows how to make papier-mache rocks, among other things. This page on Pinterest is FILLED with fantastic stage prop and scenery projects. Check it out! Even the set designs that are too complicated to do on a small scale can give you great ideas.

Have fun making your own props and scenery! See you on stage!