Signwriter painting quotes on exterior wall. Its quite often that a signwriter is used to paint quotes, generally this is common within pubs. They are a themed pub & often named after a historical fugure who may have said some famous phrases. It could be phrases to be written on Museum walls or explanations as to who someone is or was.
Slightly less common place, but only due to the many prefering the modern stick a bad vinyl sticker on the wall, is having a phrase written in the home. As said due to the home stores such as ‘the range’ & ‘B&M’ and the like offer cheap stickers for the walls with phrases such as ‘Live,Love Laugh’ and ‘Home is where the heart is’ etc
On the whole people don’t wish to have a signwriter produce this due to costs, even though the stickers will eventally peel & in some case aren’t even stuck on wall straight!
A signwriter is of use when its either a high end property wishing to keep the high end appeal, rather than use the cheaper sticker alternative, or if the surface won’t allow for stickers, so rough render or brick. In this instance the client was both of these catagories.
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To make the signwriting a smart & precise as possible, an area size of where the phrase is to be written is requested from the client. There after a visual is given to show what fypefaces & layouts the wording can be written in as well as colour of the paint. This saves a lot of time once on site. Its also the best way to be able to give an acurate costing. Also to speed up the process & avoid any spelling errors, the quote is copied from the clients email & applied in an art package. Its then altered into the preferred typeface. Then its spaced appropriately to best fit within the given size of wall. Once this is achieved the writing is the produced in the form of a pounce, which is all the words ‘printed’ to size & scale but holes are pin pricked instead of lines drawn. This is then used on site by being measured in the space, made sure its level, central & straight before charcoal powder is dabbed onto the layout. this allows the powder to go through the small pin pricks which once reliefed shows exactly where to paint on the wall.
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There is often an excess of powder but with a gentle blowing that is usually reduced & leaves just the outlines of the letters. This makes it far easier for a signwriter to get the painting far more acurate. Its less ‘arty’ as its not how the signwriter naturally paints but these days its far more likely the client prefers a typeface & chooses one rather than accepts however the signwriter hand paints using their learnt brush techniques. So in this instance it was a type face close to how the print would be in a book produced by the letterpress, rather than hand drawn, written one stroke style with a brush.
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This means that for a signwriter, its more time consuming than if painted in a brush technique where it can be a letters written in few strokes or even 1 stroke. Instead the letters are built up using a number of strokes. Its possible to be produced quicker but then you would loose a sharp edge definition to some of the letter strokes. Even more so when painting on a stippled or rough surface such as this one.
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Another main difference between a typeface chosen & a typeface written is that despite this typeface being in upper & lower case, really if written it would be cursive (joined up) but its actully spaced for more ligibility, which is far more previlant in letterpress printing for books.
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With the amount of text this phrase had & with the surface of the wall it was being painted to, it was always likely to be quite time consuming, but thats accounted for when producing the quote. Its quite relaxing to just get in the zone & get painting, quite often with music for company.
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The painting position tends to get less & less confortable as the writing gets nearer the bottom if you are starting off at head height. When this is the case its easy to try to speed up, but when the wall surface is unven this isn’t the best option as the final finish of the lettering can suffer. Its important to stay consistant, so it’s just a case of tolerate the discomfort as much as possible.
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Once all the writing was completed, the final part is just to clean the wall of all charcoal & it makes the writing stand out far more.
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It was then completed & the furniture was put into place for the client to appreciate the completed work & how it looks within the garden space.
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Traditional & Contemporary Hand Painted Sign Writing in London
Sign Writer Traditional Signs of London
https://traditionalsignsoflondon.uk/contact/
info@traditionalsignsoflondon.uk