Dan Sawatzky’s Blog

Pictures of finished park – part one

Pictures of finished park – part one

Cultus Lake Adventure Park is now finished and open to rave reviews by the public. It’s great to see everyone enjoying the project we worked on for so long! Since the park has opened I’ve been doing my best to get good pictures. The key is to get there at different times each day as the light changes every hour. I’ll be posting pictures of the final project in the next few posts

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The magic of light

The magic of light

I design all of our signs to take full advantage of daylight. The textures, with the glazes are oriented to capture the highlights and the shadows are designed to create the illusion of even more depth. But we have to go further.

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Landscape by design

Landscape by design

Many sign makers I know think mainly of the signs they create. A few try to incorporate some nice posts of perhaps a base. I like to go much further. The surrounding builds, structures and landscape are often part of our projects

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Done

Done

Today our team finished the creative work in Cultus Lake Adventure Park. It has been an exciting and busy ten month journey.  From the start we anticipated we would still be painting after the park opened it’s gates but through the hard work (and lots of overtime) of our crew we managed to finish two whole days ahead of the park opening.

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Last week of construction for Cultus Lake Adventure project

Last week of construction for Cultus Lake Adventure project

The Cultus Lake Adventure project is massive by most shop standards. The project started back in the middle of September of last year. Now we are in the final week of production with the gates to swing open to the public next Saturday. That leaves five working days to complete our work. While we have been putting in about an hour of overtime per day and two saturdays of pure overtime the pace in the last weeks has been steady – not rushed.

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More signs installed

More signs installed

As the project nears completion the pace is certainly ramping up. Today the last of the concrete walkways was poured inside the park, leaving only sidewalks around to go. Our crew is now down to paint and details with eight more workdays before the gates open to the public. We installed two dimensional signs today. The first was on the Happy Horse Saloon.

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Western eye candy

Western eye candy

There’s only ten more working days before the park opens. This means the hours are long and the pace is quick. We have one more day of sculpted concrete work to do and then it is down to paint. The clock ticks loud each and every day. Today the crew finished painting and glazing the upper false fronts

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Armadillo Hotel sign hung

Armadillo Hotel sign hung

No matter how great a sign may look in our studio the important thing is how it looks when it gets installed. Today, it was time at last to install the Armadillo Hotel sign. We loaded it onto the man lift and then raised it into position.

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Long shot, medium view and closeup

Long shot, medium view and closeup

As we put together each of our projects I design for three views. Long shots, medium views and closeups. In our large current project we were able to do it for every element (and there are many) of the park. The long shot of the setting needs to grab people’s attention and hold their interest

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