Coastal Enterprises, manufacturers of Precision Board HDU, is proud to announce a series of guest blogs written by Dan Sawatzky of Imagination Corporation, which will be posted on the Precision Board Blog each month. This month Dan Sawatzky fills us in on the Fall sculpting workshop that he puts on at Imagination Corporation every year entitled, “Sculpture Magic”. 

It’s that time of year again…. workshop time!

Each fall we host a sculpting workshop where we cover all aspects of designing, creating and marketing dimensional signage. We call it Sculpture Magic. This year we are hosting two workshops. The first is sold out (in a few hours). With such an enthusiastic response we decided to hold a second workshop as well. There are still a few seats available on a first come – first serve basis if anyone is interested. Information can be found HERE or by dropping me an email.

The sculpting workshop is designed to light your creative fires! We explore how we come up with our ideas, and what tools and materials we use to bring them to life. By breaking everything down into simple steps, we will discover that anything is possible. Our workshops are designed to take the mystery out of our craft and make it fun. Those who take the workshops are fully immersed in our creative world for three intensive days.

Our studio is located in a rural area and surrounded by breathtaking scenery. Our award winning shop would aptly be described as an artist’s theme park with wall-to-wall eye candy at every turn. Take all the pictures you want, ask any questions you want and we’ll do our best to provide the answers.

The sculpting workshop is definitely a hands-on event. Bring work clothes and work boots. We’ll supply everything else. You’ll weld, attach lath, mix our special formula of concrete, apply cement, and sculpt it. You will work on a variety of samples individually and in small teams. You will also construct an armature and then sculpt a wonderful piece of your own using sculpting epoxy. We want you to try your hand at every task we do in our shop, learning the process of exactly how we do our projects.

We’ll spend some time touring the highly-themed Hazelnut Inn (next door) to show how the same skills you learn in our shop are applied on a much larger scale. On top of that, you will witness our current shop projects in all stages of completion. It is a lot to squeeze into three days, but it is our goal to share as much as we possibly can of what took us more than forty years to learn ourselves.

It’s going to be a fun and fast-paced three days. The theme is visual storytelling. It’s all about using our imaginations to do things we have never done before.

Precision Board has been a proud sponsor of these sculpting workshops since we began them more than ten years ago. This year we are pleased to welcome Kellie Miller, Executive Account Manager with Coastal Enterprises, to this workshop. She will give a presentation on Precision Board HDU and other products offered by Coastal Enterprises.

I design and rout a custom name plaque for each person who attends the sculpting workshop. They are just over a square foot in size and are machined from 1.5” thick PBLT-30 Precision Board HDU. These name plaques are a fun challenge to create. I use them to test out new texture bitmaps I am working on and new ideas for sign shapes. Our painting crew always pulls out all the stops when they paint them up. They use every painting and glazing technique they can muster and inevitably invent a few more along the way. The results are truly eye-catching and are an eye candy delight for the attendees when they enter the shop.

Juan Pablo’s name plaque uses a new texture I am working on. I wanted the piece to resemble a woven fabric which is undulating naturally. I used three different bitmaps (layered) to create this effect. It is going to be interesting to see how this paints up.

For Ava’s plaque I used a maple leaf bitmap which has various shades of grey to form the layers. The painters will use various shades of orange and reds to paint it. Then they will add some fun glazes to really make this pop. The letters will be done with variegated gold leaf to take it over the top.

There are thirty name plaques in all (so far), each one unique.

Sawatzky’s Imagination Corporation is a small family company that specializes in the design and creation of dimensional signs and environments. They tackle projects of any size from small signs to entire theme parks. Their work has garnered numerous national and international awards.

Dan Sawatzky is best described as a creative force and visual storyteller extraordinaire. His art career spans almost fifty years of magic. Dan’s passion is to design and create imaginative places that take people from the normal world to a setting of delight and wonder.

Coastal Enterprises manufactures Precision Board HDU, a versatile, cost-effective and eco-friendly urethane sign material that is particularly effective for making professional-looking indoor and outdoor dimensional signs.  It is a closed-cell rigid substrate that does not rot, warp or crack.  You can request free samples, get a quote or sign up for periodic newsletters packed with helpful information.

The following is an unsolicited testimonial written by Dan Sawatzky with Imagination Corporation in Chilliwack, British Columbia, Canada.  In his post, Dan talks about the long-term value of Precision Board HDU versus the upfront costs and why he loves to work with Coastal Enterprises’ high-density urethane.

Dan Sawatzky in his own words…

I often hear people comment about the price of Precision Board, thinking it to be an expensive medium. I beg to differ. When I compare it to materials I used previously it is actually a great bargain. Back in the 1980’s I loved to make dimensional signs from clear edge grain redwood. Finding quality product was no easy task. I did manage to find a supplier in the next town and when I added the time it took to drive there, carefully go through his pile of lumber to pick out the best edge grain lumber and then drive back to my shop it got much more expensive. I would then have to glue up the boards and run those through my planer to get the blanks I needed.  I would do a layout by hand, and cut my frisket the same way. Then came the sandblasting – a task that I never did enjoy.  All this was before we began laying on the paint. More often than not it wouldn’t be long until I got a call back that the varnish was failing or the sign had split. Wood is like that.

These days we absolutely love working with Precision Board. We use nothing less than 30 lb density. While not exactly cheap it is a bargain when you think about it. The price per board foot is less than I paid for redwood thirty years ago and that’s before I added in the labor to get it and laminate it into usable sheets! The material comes in 4’x8’  sheets in any thickness we need. There is no need to worry about direction of grains and we can laminate it up where we need more thickness. We can realistically mimic any woodgrain imaginable or any other dimensional pattern we can think of. The paint lasts so much longer too! And instead of working by hand we use our MultiCam to speed up the process immensely.

We are going through a ton of Precision Board on our current project and our formerly tall pile of board is quickly disappearing. Its high time to get serious about another large order of Precision Board very soon!

Sawatzky’s Imagination Corporation is a small family company that specializes in the design and creation of dimensional signs and environments. They tackle projects of any size from small signs to entire theme parks. Their work has garnered numerous national and international awards.

Dan Sawatzky is best described as a creative force and visual storyteller extraordinaire. His art career spans almost fifty years of magic. Dan’s passion is to design and create imaginative places that take people from the normal world to a setting of delight and wonder.

Coastal Enterprises manufactures Precision Board HDU, a versatile, cost-effective and eco-friendly urethane sign material that is particularly effective for making professional-looking indoor and outdoor dimensional signs.  It is a closed-cell rigid substrate that does not rot, warp or crack.  You can request free samples, get a quote or sign up for periodic newsletters packed with helpful information.

Coastal Enterprises, manufacturers of Precision Board HDU, is proud to host guest blogs written by some of the signage industry’s biggest movers and shakers, posted to the Precision Board Blog.  This guest blog is written by Dan Sawatzky with Imagination Corporation in Chilliwack, British Columbia, Canada.  This month, Dan gives us an update on two dimensional signs his shop is fabricating for a tourism farm project.  He shows us how far along each sign is as well as the concept drawings they are based on.

In Dan’s own words…

A couple of months ago I talked about some fun dimensional farm signs which were in design. Seven of those designs are now in production in the shop. I’ll give a sneak peek at two currently in progress. As with most of our projects we are using a combination of four material; plasma cut steel, hand sculpted fibreglass-reinforced-concrete, hand sculpted epoxy and routed PBLT-30 Precision Board HDU.

Each started with a hand drawn design.

The sign faces (double-sided) were laminated over 2” x 2” square steel tubing for maximum strength. This made this sign about 5” thick. This sign incorporates a planter which is actually a watering trough for animals. I drilled holes in the bottom to provide adequate drainage.

We then applied the fibreglass-reinforced-concrete over the armature and hand-sculpted the woodgrain.

Between the time we received a go for production and when I sent some progress pictures to the owners they had renamed the Cookie Coop for a member of their extended family. I used a die grinder to take off ’THE’ and routed up a board with “BOB’s” on it. Although obviously an addition, it fits in with the story of the farm.

The second sign is a whole lot of fun as I really love trains. It is modeled after the train they run for guests on the farm and is named after the owner’s dad.

The owner wanted very substantial brackets so we cut the pieces from a half-inch thick steel plate.

While we were fabricating the bracket, the router was carving the train. It is routed from five layers of Precision Board. Here’s a picture of the pieces right off the MultiCam. I’ll be adding much of the detail by hand using sculpting epoxy.

As with all of our Precision Board projects we laminated structural steel tubing inside for strength. The train was then glued and screwed around this layer.

This sign is going to be a real head-turner when we are done. I’ll post some pics the next time. Stay tuned….

Sawatzky’s Imagination Corporation is a small family company that specializes in the design and creation of dimensional signs and environments. They tackle projects of any size from small signs to entire theme parks. Their work has garnered numerous national and international awards.

Dan Sawatzky is best described as a creative force and visual storyteller extraordinaire. His art career spans almost fifty years of magic. Dan’s passion is to design and create imaginative places that take people from the normal world to a setting of delight and wonder.

Coastal Enterprises manufactures Precision Board HDU, a versatile, cost-effective and eco-friendly urethane sign material that is particularly effective for making professional-looking indoor and outdoor dimensional signs.  It is a closed-cell rigid substrate that does not rot, warp or crack.  You can request free samples, get a quote or sign up for periodic newsletters packed with helpful information.