Blogs
Cookie’s Galley done
With a large crew to keep busy and big projects in planning it’s not too often I get to spend time with a paint brush in my hand these days. But Cookie has been a pet project from design, sculpt, creating the routing file and through the paint process. Other members of the crew did work on the project a little but the bulk of it has been mine. I decided that I would personally finish the paint job on the lettering portion as well as the the highlights and touchups on.
Sign Paint underway
We are now beginning to assemble and finish the signs for the Trinidad project, starting with Cookie’s Galley sign. In the last few days we’ve done the finishing and laid on the base coats of paint. We use premium exterior house paint for all of our finishes and glazes with good results. Today it was time for the first glaze to bring out the woodgrain textures
Pieces of eight – redo
Sometimes, after I complete a design I just know I could have done better. There’s only one thing to do. DELETE.
KC’s Car Care – Redux – ( and some big news )
From time to time, we may miss the mark a little. In this case, we had an idea that the car and bike should be the same scale. Once the bike was applied, the customer didn’t like the size of it.
Phil’s Pholly
A while back I posted a how-to on the Treasure Quest sign. In the last installment the sign had been laminated over the framework. The rest of the twisted tree had been lathed and was ready for the concrete. Since then we sculpted the concrete ‘wood and bark’ and allowed the tee to cure before it was ready to drag back in the shop to finish up.
Piece of eight
Designing and building a theme park is a lot of fun, especially if you get to control all aspects of the design. The rides are being manufactured by a company in Italy but they allowed me to help with the design to help the ride fit into the theme of the park. Unless we want to spend a great deal of our customer’s money the changes are limited to cosmetic items alone.
2014 Sign Magic Workshop a success!
We had a high energy group assembled for our 2014 Sign Magic Workshop. Our guests were from all over including Nevis – Alberta, Newark – California, Hickory – North Carolina, Jackson – Wyoming, Prior Lake – Minnesota, Invermere – Roberts Creek – Vernon – British Columbia, and Aitkenvale – Australia. Jeff Hartman, one of the creators of EnRoute came from Denver – Colorado to help with the technical side of things. This eager group soaked up everything we shared, took tons of photos and notes and did up some pretty spectacular projects during the hands-on workshop time
Sign Recreation: Ben & Jerrys
Technology is truly awesome! We were recently contacted by a retail store that had their sign damaged beyond repair in a storm. The client had to have the same sign recreated – this was a hand carved Ice cream cone and logo. She decided to ship me the parts to inspect so I could recreate it. The package arrived and yes it was beyond repair and covered in dirt and… mold. As I was putting the parts together to get measurements Rad, our Production Manager, walked by and said “Just 3D Scan It”. I hadn’t thought of it but that sounded like a fun way to reproduce the sign. So I put together the broken sign on the floor and ran our hand held Cubify Sense 3D scanner over the face of the old sign and it appeared on the screen in 3D model form.
Workshop name plates 2014 – Part eight
I covered the file creation of Philip’s name plate back on September 2. It looked great after it was routed from 30 lb Precision Board. The painting crew was ready to give it a cool paint job but I asked them to hold off for I had a little more detail in mind. They had already applied some FSC-88 WB primer (thick bodied water base primer) using a small brush to add some texturing to the lettering. Philip is attending both workshops and rather than make him two name plates I decided I would make him one that was a little more elaborate. Sarah mixed up some Abracadabra Sculpting Epoxy for me and I quickly sculpted some barnacles and a starfish that was slowly making it’s way down across the lettering.