Signwriting

A little bit of a longer gap in blogging than I had anticipated but I've just had too much to do and not enough time to do it :-(

Let me start again by showing you the labours of a great day out I had a few weeks ago at a signwriting course with one of my sisters and mum. Mum had found the course and two of her daughters didn't need much persuading to go with her. The course was held at Assington Mill an amazing venue with Wayne Tanswell - Traditional Signwriter as tutor. Wayne had a very relaxed easy-going teaching style which meant that we didn't feel too intimidated by what we were about to try and complete, which was to end the day with our own hand painted sign.

We started off by just practicing the strokes needed which was actually very therapeutic and I could quite happily have done this all day.

Then we got to do our chosen word or words for real on a piece of wood for. As our house sign has bullet holes in it .... yes bullet holes. Oh alright I'll tell you why. The reason it has bullet holes is because my dear husband and one of our dear friends one night decided to set up tin cans on our gate and then preceded to kneel at our kitchen window shooting the tin cans off the gate with the air rifle. They are not very good shots and the gate and sign got peppered making it look like we have been subject to numerous drive by shootings. So back to the sign here is the chalked out lettering.

And here is the painted version.

And here is the final shadowed version.

Now although I put a lot of paint on the board the reason it looks so good and so perfect is sadly not because I am a natural at signwriting but because maybe Wayne came and touched it up just a little bit!

Everyone else produced amazing work too.

We had a great day out, delicious lunch and came home with a sign and a better understanding and insight into how difficult, but not actually that scary, traditional signwriting is.