The Sign

No, I’m not talking about some kind of mystical go-ahead from the universe.  I mean that I actually made a real-life sign, advertising my dog collar products.

My brother did a print-making course at diploma level and has made some awesome print artworks over the last few years.  He helped me out with how on earth to make an, um, ‘professional’ looking sign as I have no experience in doing this, and in fact having studied science at school and University, have never done much art at all!

The basic process of making a sign like this is as follows:

Supplies: Sign backing (wood, etc), painters masking tape, pencil, computer & printer, boxcutter knife, applicable colours of spray paint, newspaper, large ruler

- Find a suitable piece of sign material – in my case a piece of wooden board, approx. 1.5m x 1m

- Cover entire board in painters’ masking tape

- Create the images that require stencilling (images, lettering etc) and print them out (if you print outlines only you’ll save printer ink!) get a normal pencil, and rub the pencil onto the BACK of the images, making sure you cover all of the outlines.

- Place them onto the board where required (a long draughtsmans’ ruler will help a LOT with planning this part), and then trace around the outline on the front of the designs, pressing hard.

- Remove the printed outline – you should see a transfer of the pencil rubbing outline onto the masking tape.

- Cut out the outlines of the letterings/ pictures of ONE colour (if you have more than one colour in your design) and peel off the masking tape.  Leave second/third/etc colours with the masking tape intact

- Get the correct coloured spray paint and smoothly paint the cut-out shapes, making sure you spray evenly and not too heavily so it will drip.

- Wait until the first colour is dry, then cover with newspaper or similar.  Take the masking tape off the second colour, spray paint as above.

- Repeat until all colours are complete.

- When all paint is dry, peel off all of the masking tape remaining, to reveal your awesome sign!

I LOVED making this sign, it was such simple pleasure to do something artistic as I don’t normally do artistic pursuits.  I got so excited I emailed all of my friends just to show them what I’d done!

Laying out the printout lettering

All lettering cut out except for the heart which is a different colour

Spraypainting the black images

Black all sprayed, now to cut out the heart shape to paint pink!

The final sign!

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