Going from the gold

The 2016 Sign Challenge to be held at the International Sign Association Expo is coming fast! Peter’s and my entry pieces have been ready since the new year but before we sent them off we had one more piece to build. It’s the trophy that all of the entrants are hoping for.

The design of the prize is meant to reflect the competition itself. The dimensional letters are stacked up inside a crate. The letters will be gold while the welded metal box will be rusted metal. All will be mounted and displayed on a tall pedestal. A few more coats of gold paint are still to come and the metal box still needs more work. The pedestal base has yet to be started. It’s a fun little project.

Published with permission from precisionboard.blogspot.com. Source.

Some serious bling!

Normally the welded steel armatures we build for our sculptures don’t get any treatment. Most of the the frames never see the light of day and are hidden inside our sculptures behind a thick layer of sculpted concrete. The pieces going to Dubai are going into a water park environment and the client asked the they be galvanized to ensure they don’t rust.

Today the galvanizer phoned to tell us they have some out of the zinc vat and were ready for pickup. Instead of the usual are steel frame the armatures were all bright and shiny silver. We took the pieces back to the shop and then lightly sandblasted the areas of the feature that will remain exposed. This included the blades of the sword and axes as well as the lift points. The purpose of the sandblasting was to give the surfaces a bit of tooth to allow our paint and glazes to better adhere over the long haul.

Now we’ll tie on the usual galvanized lath but instead of our usual black tie wire we’ll use specially sourced galvanized wire. Next week we should be ready to begin the sculpting process at last!

Published with permission from precisionboard.blogspot.com. Source.

Six more routed

With all of the other things going on in our shop these days we manage to design and route three or four name plaques each day. There are still six weeks until the workshops so we will have time to do them at a somewhat leisurely pace. Six more are now ready for paint.

Published with permission from precisionboard.blogspot.com. Source.

Simon

Simon’s name plaque was all about using texture bitmaps to manipulate the relief in cool ways. I wanted the finished name plaque to resemble two plates riveted together with the lettering raised over the top. The first step was to create the necessary vectors.

I then created two separate fat reliefs.

When I hit the render button they appeared as one relief but this is because they were the same height.

I then used a freehand shade to create a slightly sloped and irregular warp. The same bitmap was applied to the second relief (on the left) – one at a time.

Once I had applied the bitmaps I checked out the front view to make sure I had the results I was looking for.

I created a rectangle vector (bigger than the lettering outline and then applied a second bitmap of a random fade. This will create a twist in the relief. I combined the two riveted plate vectors and applied the same twisted bitmap to them with the same value of 0.6″ (which is quite large and will produce a dramatic result.

The rectangle was hidden below the combined plate reliefs. I would deal with that a little later.

The rivets were created next using the dome tool.

I then modified the rectangle relief by adding to it using the lettering border as a mask. I hit the render and it was peeking out a little but not enough.

The solution was to add more height to the modification. I thought I had added enough but when I added the texture to age the plate I had the same problem and so I added more height to the lettering outline another time.