As I begin to lay the base coats of paint on the sign it requires a bit of faith that things will turn out right. The colors are garish, a bit too bright. I know from experience that as we apply the glazes, working from light to dark that things will settle down and blend together nicely. We will apply two or three different colors of glaze - stopping only when things look absolutely right.

When I am happy with the backgrounds I will paint in the pictorial, basing my final color choices on the look of the background. This too will be layered with glazes until everything ties together. Once everything is cleaned up and double coated the 23K gold leaf will be applied to the lettering making everything jump.

We are working with acrylic paints. Because they dry so quick we must work swiftly, but it also works in our favor too for the paint dries rapidly allowing us to paint on the next layer in a shorter time frame than we ever could when we worked with oil based paints. The paints we use are light fast which means they will look good for years to come. Happily there are few fumes to deal with and cleanup is with water. I like these type of paints much, much better than anything else we have used in the past.

Stay tuned for more progress...

-grampa dan