The opening of the first Muppet Movie starts with Kermit sitting in his swamp playing his banjo and singing, “The Rainbow Connection.” We wanted to capture this scene for our visitors, so in addition to Kermit’s swamp, we also wanted to create a large rainbow to go with it.

Based on our concept art, to fit the scale of the rest of the set the rainbow needed to be about 12 feet long, which, when paired with the fact that it is curved and has seven colored stripes, makes for a nice challenge to make out of cardboard.

I used a projector to project the curved shape on to large pieces of cardboard and then traced over the shape with a thick pen.

From there, I cut the shapes out to get three segments which would ultimately become the rainbow.

How, then to ensure that I had equal spacing for the stripes of the rainbow, so those who would be painting it would be able to have accurate guide lines? I devised a little ‘artist’s tool’ to help with that. I taped Sharpie markers onto a ruler (using the ruler lines to make sure that I placed the markers at equal distances from each other), and then used that tool to sketch curved guide lines on all of the rainbow sections.

Once that was done, those who came to our Community Painting Day used the guidelines for painting the stripes. They painted every other stripe first, so that the paint could dry, and then went back in and finished all of the rest of the stripes.

With that, all the sections of the rainbow were complete!

All that remains is for us to mount this rainbow on to our support structure above Kermit’s swamp so that it is ready for Halloween night.