Signs of the Finest Kind

2007-04-17T12:28:00.000-07:00

One of the most enjoyable aspects of owning my shop is doing signs and graphics for myself. Not only does it showcase my skills for potential clients, but it challenges my abilities to produce images using materials and techniques that aren't used in everyday production.

These door windows are the latest example of this. My good friend Connie Deegan did the stained glass work, and I did the graphics on the centers, pulling out the stops to use a number of glass techniques, including glue-chipping, gilding with various alloys of gold leaf, along with painting, blending and stippling. The results are a striking set of windows, unlike anything else.

To see the kind of quality we do at FKS every day, have a look at www.finestkindsigns.com and see what we can do for YOUR buiness image.

2007-04-16T13:33:00.000-07:00

Here's a new sign installed on Friday. We built two of these (installed on an existing set of brick pillars) for a resort motel near the beach. The signs are 42" x 6', made entirely of HDU and dibond laminate on an aluminum frame. They replaced carved wood signs done about fifteen years ago. The client has purchased other high-end signs before, for two restaurants, and were very pleased with our latest efforts.

2007-03-20T08:06:00.000-07:00

Here's another picture of Mahaffeys with the new sign. I'm going to have to get back to Charm City sometime soonso I can drink here again. If you look at their site http://www.mahaffeyspub.com/ you'll see how desperately they needed a new sign.

And remember... the secret to succesful drinking is good nutrition. So while enjoying those delicious draught microbrews and Belgian ales, take a look at the menu... this place has some of the best pub food in Baltimore. Cheers...

2007-03-20T07:59:00.000-07:00

This picture was supposed to load on the last post. Such are the vagaries of the blog site. If you are ever in the Canton section of Baltimore and find yourself developing the sort of powerful thirst that only beer can quench, this is your place. While you are at it, eat something - the food is outstanding. Tell Wayne you saw this here.

2007-03-20T07:43:00.000-07:00

In December of 2005 I shipped this sign to a pub owner in Baltimore, Maryland. The owner didn't install the sign immediately; instead, he unpacked it and kept it in the bar for several months, where it suffered some damage. The price to ship it back to be repaired was prohibitive; consequently, it languished for over a year until last month, when I came in contact with a sign man in Maryland named Mark Kottwitz. Mark took on the task of repairing and installing the sign, and here it is at last.

2007-03-19T13:57:00.000-07:00

I've been doing business with Bob Mercer and Bill Bertsche for years; so I was very pleased to do a new sign for their office in Old Mystic. This is a perfect example of a carved sign in the classic New England style; very traditional "tablet" design, with gold leaf on a deep green ground, framed in cottage red - nothing outrageous or unexpected, just the sort of sign that speaks of pride, quality and professionalism.
I've become quite fond of a typeface called "titus" for carved signs. It has the proportions of a classic Roman face with calligraphic details in the serifs and cross-bars that give it a warm, hand-rendered feel. It lends itself well to both hand-carving and computeried routing - the Mercer and Bertsce sign is incise hand carved, while the Weekapaug Golf Club sign is the same face, machine carved, raised with prismatic faces. Titus works equally well with in both.

2007-01-15T09:46:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I've written here, so I want to share a project I'm currently working on in the shop.

This is a sign for a lakefront cottage called "Windy Waters". It's hand carved in SignFoam HDU; in this picture you see it as I have just finished carving the lettering and the "fan" image. You can also see the pencilled line which shows the eventual shape of the panel, which I will cut out after the carving is complete.

This sign will also have a painted picture of a sailboat, which will go inside the circle you can see in the upper half of the sign. This is a fairly typical carved sign from my shop; to see other examples go to www.finestkindsign.com

2006-12-08T14:10:00.000-08:00

Here's to the best-laid plans. I promised to cover a carved sign project from beginning to end; but I got real busy and plum fergot. We'll try again some othe time. In the meanwhile I've pushed a couple of other nice projects out the door, and now it's two weeks til Christmas and time to think about what the last year taughtme and what the new year will bring. Stay tuned.

2006-11-14T07:54:00.000-08:00

Here is the finished version of the sign posted two days ago.
More of this kind of work can be seen at www.finestkindsign.com

Today I'll be carving a pair of signs for a real estate office. The artwork isn't very exciting, but I'm going to photograph the job step by step and post it here, to show you what is involved in this kind of sign.

2006-11-09T14:19:00.000-08:00

Time to stop being political and get back to signs. This job is more interesting than most;
the client had seen another sign I did a few years ago with a marbleized finish, and asked for a similar look. Marbleing can be fun. The background color is laid down, and while its still wet, I stippled in another tint with a rag, then went over it with a ragged pigeon feather to make the pale green veining. If you don't quite remember exactly what green Traventine marble is supposed to look like, it's not a bad immitation. The frame is plastic molding, and the corner rosettes are pine, sprayed with metallic-copper spray paint, allof which came from Home Depot for about $2o. The copy you see was hand- lettered - because I can, dammit - and will be outlined with gold metallic paint. There's also some copy in white vynull pesch to go underneath (gotta make the plotter earn its keep). I'll post the finished job...well...when its finished.

2006-11-09T13:01:00.000-08:00

So... The Democrats won control of Congress, and that slimy socialist powermongering left-wing cunt Nancy Pelosi will become the next Speaker of the House. What's that you say?...I'm being nasty? This is the woman who publicly called the President of the United States "stupid, dangerous, and incompetent". Now if she and lots of other Dems can say that, I feel perfectly within my rights to call her a screeching shit-brained twat. And anyone who thinks this collection of self-important clowns is going to give up the name-calling and shit-slinging in the name of "bipartisan cooperation" is as dumb as a bag of hammers.

Don't get me wrong; I'm glad the Dems won. If any political organization needed a sound thrap between the eyes it was the current gang of buttfucks that calls itself the Republican Party. Maybe now they can take a short break from spreading their pimply cheeks for corporate lobbyists and all those greasy, half-wit, Jesus-screeching pulpit pounders, and try to remember what it used to mean to be a Republican. Start with remembering that those of us with real jobs and real-life responsiblities don't give a thirty-second fuck about gay marriage, partial-birth abortions, and theories of creation that would embarrass a neanderthal. In other words, stop grubbing for votes from Nascar Nation, the vast semi-illiterate hordes of the southern cotton-mill class. These people are an embarassment to Republicanism, a nitwit mob of pentacostal howler monkeys and semi-reformed Kluxers, barely a generation removed from lynching and cross-burning. When the Republican Party went trolling for votes among people who have a close ratio of inbred children to functioning teeth, they forgot the central truth of politics that has existed since the Confederacy, namely, that stupid people are natural Democrats, and that no matter how far they may wander, the party of the Braying Jackass will always, sooner or later, call them home. Counting on rednecks to reliably vote Republican is like dressing a gorilla in a tuxedo; sooner or later the suit will get ruined and the ape won't give a shit one way or the other. The only way to keep this breed of voter in line is to swim in the same revelation-reading, race-baiting intellectual gutter, to pander to their atavistic religious superstitions and their deep-seated hatred of anyone that they suspect may be smarter than they are, which, believe me, is not a stretch.

The natural function of the Republicans has been to keep these people away from the levers of power, not hand the damn things over to them. Allowing government to be run by Mississippi Baptists is to be ruled by people with the intellectual sophistication and religious subtleties of Haitians, Hottentots, or 12th-century Albanians; sooner or later, intelligent people whose education doesn't begin and end with memorizing the King James Bible are going to recoil in disgust and throw them out. Which pretty much describes what happened on Tuesday. It's a sad, nay, pitiful state of affairs when people think of Democrats as the party for people of taste, intellectual curiousity, and modern dental hygiene.

2006-10-31T06:30:00.000-08:00

This sign was shipped to Baltimore, Md. back in December of last year.

The midterm elections are a week from today, and I'm probably more conflicted about voting than I've ever been. On one hand, I have a strong urge to pull the chain - to vote out ALL the incumbents, and let the Dems take over. I just wish I liked them any better than the clowns that are in power now. The problem is that no matter who I vote for, the system is the incumbent. Its the almighty Republicratic Demopublican Party, the same pack of howler monkeys hooting over the same old shit, with the only goal being to keep the voters distracted while they pick our pockets.

Truth? Like Nicholson says in a few good men, "you can't handle the truth." A political figure who tells it like it is, without pandering to the lefties or the Jesus screechers or talking outside the official script, is immediately labled a radical, or an extremist, or a nut, and marginalized and disregarded. The act of running for office in the United States requires selling out on some level, just to use the script required for support of whatever pressure group the candidate wants to be identified with.

Even the so-called "third party" candidates fall into this trap. Look at the Green Party, which is touted as a potential rival to the Demopublicans. In order to be a Greenie, you have to hold - or at least claim to hold - some of their basic ideas, the majority of which consist of juvenile histrionics about corporate greed and sky-is-falling enviro-facsism, along with a good big dose of truly idiotic hippy-dippy notions involving the efficacy of crystals, pyramids, vegetarianism and the regular application of high colonics. The Green Party platform is just the standard Democratic lefty notions taken to their logical conclusions, by which they become separated from anything resembling common sense, and enter the airy heights of utopian fantasy. Yet this is what passes for a semi-serious alternative to politics as usual.

The Democrats are always being accused of not having any "new ideas". Why does this come as a surprise? Long-term Dems don't want to hear any new ideas, at least not those that come painfully close to the truth, which is that the their long-cherished world view is a greasy mush of guilt, victim-worship and envy, leavened by the bitter realization that while much of the world at large may claim to agree with their principles, it will never give up any significant amount of material comfort to bring them into fruition. The whole central idea of being a Democrat is that someone, somewhere, is conspiring to cheat you out of your "fair share" of the material goodies in which our society is awash, and that the only enlightened approach to political economy is to find and punish those who, whether by luck, or connections, or skill - the reasons don't matter, only the results - have more material success than someone else. Individual effort, and its resulting accomplishments, are evidence of a character flaw, unless accompanied by a sense of guilt. For those with the temerity to achieve and NOT feel guilty, well, brother, we'll just see about that! This is the poisonous stew that congeals into such "progressive" ideas such as income redistribution, spawning legislation such as the Millionaire's Tax and other harping, confiscatory idiocy that seeks to level things out, without any acknowledgement of the consequences.

Then their are the Republicans. I speak of the present incarnation of the GOP, which has whored itself out to the so-called Social Conservatives in exchange for political power. In the forty years that the GOP was on the short-handed side of Congress, it learned the hard lesson that strongly-held opinions can only be trumped by other even more strongly-held opinions. Unfortunately, it surrendered the notion that these opinions ought to be based on some valid notion of reality, and traded the honest and sensible philosophy of individual rights and individual achievement for the power of opinions based on superstition, as in authoritarian religious belief. Yet the architects of this trade, mindful that the sort of people who won't put up with the collectivist looting from the Left aren't about to stand being ordered around by jesus-screeching numskulls, have gone to great lengths to cloak their puritannical obsessions in a cloak of "conservative freedom-loving values". To the extent that they have offered an alternative to the milk-toast socialism of the Democrats, this has been successful, but at what a price? The Republicans buy their power from every greasy little fraud in every backwoods pulpit in America, and as a result, instead of honest debate about serious national priorities, we have bloviated arguments over subjects such as gay marriage and creationism in the public schools. As far as I am concerned, any political organization demanding that the superstition-based creation myth of an obscure Middle Eastern tribe be presented as the scientific equivalent of the objective obsevations of Darwin, et al, or that seriously proposes that the legal marriage of a pair of flannel-wearing dykes is the beginning of the end of Western Civilization, deserves nothing so much as my undying revulsion and disdain.

2006-10-18T10:47:00.000-07:00

In the last post here, I wrote about gold leaf and its substitutes. Here are a couple of photos that dramatically show the difference. The letter R is a plastic letter with a factory "metallic gold" finish. The SI are the same type of plastic letters, gilded with genuine 23k gold leaf. As anyone can see, there is no comparison. The letters finished in 23k gold leaf are brilliantly reflective and eye-catching, while the "gold" of the letter R is a dull, lifeless yellow-brown, the color of the diaper-filling byproduct of a three-month old infant. Calling this fake, nasty, babysh*t-brown color "gold" is an obscenity and an insult to intelligence, taste and aesthetic sensibility. That's why when you visit www.finestkindsign.com , everything you see that says gold, is real gold, not some cheap, shoddy imitation. Our clients know the difference, and now, so do you.

2006-10-18T08:08:00.000-07:00

This window sign is done with 23k gold leaf and paint, in a process called reverse glass gilding. Reverse, because the image is rendered on the inside of the glass, to read from the outside. It's a fairly complex process, requiring a specific set of proceedures, from cleaning the glass to applying the gold to painting the colors and backing. I don't have opportunities to do much of this kind of work, which is a shame, really. Like a lot of traditional techniques, it has been replaced by cheap substitutes, such as the cheesy fake-gold vinyl films that are cut on a computerized plotter. The average customer usually doesn't know the difference unless they have a direct, side-by-side comparison; more to the point, the majority of modern sign makers can't be bothered to learn any technique that takes more than ten minutes and isn't disgorged by a computer with minimal effort. They tend to invest in machinery, rather than in developing basic skills, and the results are, for the most part, depressingly dull, artificial and predictable.

Admittedly, it's difficult to display the detail and power of this kind of work in a photo. What makes glass gilding so effective, when seen in person, is the play of reflected light and shadow best described as movement. The mirror-like reflection of the gold captures the motions of objects before it, attracting the attention of the viewer as he or she passes before it. This is why I describe images like these as not merely seen, but experienced. No artificial "gold" foil or digital print can create this magical sense of movement, for which there is literally no substitute.

There are more photos of this type of signage at my website, www.finestkindsign.com

2006-10-16T11:05:00.000-07:00

Last Tuesday we installed the re-finished Trek tours sign in Westerly, RI. I wrote about these signs here last week, since then we used new posts to properly display the finished work. I won't go into the details about the challenges that accompanied this installation, except that this job reminded me - again - that installing signs is rarely straightforward and never routine!

2006-10-16T08:16:00.000-07:00

This was perhaps the most unexpected outcome of a job that I've ever experienced, and the story "bears" telling. These two signs were made in 2003 for a restaurant and pub being opened in Canada. The client was a local woman who had a family connection in a town in northern Ontario, and ordered these signs in the fall, with the instruction that they were to be ready for the end of November. Around December 1st she came to the shop, approved the finished signs and paid the balance due in full - approxamately $9000 - and asked us to hold the signs until the end of the year, when she planned to pick them up for transport to Ontario.

Well, months went by, with no word from the client. She did not return phone calls, but as the signs had been paid for, I didn't worry about it. In the summer of 2004 I found out, secondhand, that the Ontario project had been abruptly cancelled and the property sold. Still no word from the client, so the signs were hung up inside my shop, to wait for some sort of resolution.

Fast forward to 2006.... the coach of the local Stonington High School Girls' Basketball team came by to order a small sign to commemorate a State Championship. Stonington's mascot is a bear, and the school had just finished a new gymnasium, so I suggested the wall sign (the horizontal sign above left) , with a small modification, might look good in the new gym.

Now it appears that this is going to happen! Today the coach and the Athletic Director came by to look at the sign, and pending a final decision, the sign will go up in the new Stonington Bears gymnasium. Meanwhile, the second sign - with the bear cub holding a mug of beer on his belly - will still be in my shop, waiting, perhaps forever, for a new home.
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2006-10-12T12:04:00.000-07:00

Over the years I've put up quite a few signs in Mystic - the business community there has been very receptive to the kind of work I do, and I enjoy working with clients who are willing to make a significant investment in the image their business projects. Mystic is a major tourist destination, so creating a sign for the Visitor Center at the Mystic Railroad Depot was a great opportunity to showcase the kind of work I do.

There are very few jobs that have no limits. When dealing with business clients there are always issues with design or budget - and in creating the depot sign I didn't want to have restrictions or make any compromises. So my first order of business was to approach the Chamber of Commerce, which was overseeing the Depot restoration, with an offer they couldn't refuse - I would donate the sign, free of charge. My only stipulation was that I had complete control; I would submit my design sketches to show the Depot Committee what I had in mind, but would not accept any changes or seek any advice. The proposition was essentially "take it or leave it".

This sign has just about all the bells and whistles. Hand carved raised dimensional letters, raised panels with incised hand carved letters, a carved compass rose, 23k gold, sterling silver and copper leaf, and a green crushed-glass smalt background. Lots of dimension, lots of gold, lots of play of light and shadow, very tactile. The Depot committee got all they could have wanted and then some.

At the time I did this job, five years ago, I valued it at $5000. Replacement value today would probably be a bit more. It's just a number; what I get out of this is having created a great sign that greets thousands of visitors to Mystic, and to have done exactly as it should be.

2006-10-12T08:46:00.000-07:00

This was one of two matching painted sign for a restaurant in Westerly, RI, done this past summer. The material is DiBond, an aluminum/polyvinyl laminate, and the image is hand-painted with sign enamels. This type of sign is fairly typical mid-level work in my shop, yet the use of color and some fairly sophisticated design work makes it unique and effective.

This client was impressed by my signs on another Westerly restaurant, so from the beginning of our consultation, I knew she was looking to create a strong and appealing image for her business. At the same time, opening a restaurant is a daunting task, and she made it clear that she was working with a limited budget. Using a prefinished, man-made laminate like DiBond - which requires no priming or sealing - allows me to spend more time on design, while painting the sign allows me a virtually infinite color palette to bring this design to life.

The fact that this sign is handlettered is not really the point - this design could be cut and applied with multi-layered vinyl, or printed on a large-formant inkjet. The reason I display it here is to show that even with a limited budget, it was possible to design and create signs that exceeded my clients expectations.

2006-10-06T15:43:00.000-07:00

In the ongoing daily struggle of business and life in general, I like to believe that every day is a good day, and some are better than others. Today wasn't one of the better days.

It started with a meeting with a very agressive potential client, the type who uses intimidation and ultimatums to gain advantage in a negotiation. I find this personally repulsive and insulting; had I not been there as a subcontractor to answer technical questions on a job, I may very well have walked out of the meeting. At the very least, had it been my negotiation to conduct, I'd have handled it very differently. After all the years I've been in this business, and given the level of work I've done and the images and successes I've created for my clients, I am baffled by the attitude of some business people that I am somehow trying to cheat them. I resent it when a client wants a cheaper price, but can't be up-front with their budget or requirements, expecting instead to manipulate me into doing the same work for less. This kind of game leaves me with a bad feeling for the whole process.

2006-10-03T15:11:00.000-07:00

This week I'm finishing this job for a Westerly RI travel agency. This job involved refinishing a sign that was several years old, and had been lettered with vinyl, so the old vinyl had to be stripped and the signboard refinished with new colors, chosen by the client. The client wanted an upgraded look, but didn't have the budget for a new carved sign; the compromise was to purchase individual letters for the main copy, and finish them with 23k gold leaf. The rest of the copy was hand lettered. Although this is not my favorite way to do a sign - I prefer to use new materials and start from scratch - this sign will still look good and be an effective advertising tool, while staying within the client's budget restrictions.

2006-09-28T14:00:00.000-07:00

The official Finest Kind Sign website is now live, with several things still under construction, at www.finestkindsign.com Today I spent a couple of hour on the phone with Jeremy Fennema, my webmaster at www.builditbuyit.com learning how to edit pages. Okay, so it sounds easy on the phone... suffice to say I have great respect for the skills involved in website design. Anyway, there are now more photos up and some neat stuff to see, coming from the archives of the last 18 years in this business. Its interesting - to me at least - to see how my designs have evolved over the years; how some have aged well and others look dated or less than what I would want to do now.

The big change has come from computer-assisted design. It's so easy now to fine-tune a design, adjust copy size or spacing or try different letterstyles. In the past when everything was drawn and patterned by hand, it was a lot of work to make even small changes, and admittedly there were days when time constraints and exhaustion allowed things to be done less than perfectly. One bugbear that always pestered me, back then, was centering. I have a hell of a time looking and judging a center by eye - I'm always off, just a bit, whereas for lines being level and parallel I can spot an eighth-inch variation over a six-foot length. When an entire sign is patterned by hand and one line is an inch off center, you either re-do the pattern or figure out "shortcuts" - like pouncing (which means transfering the pattern to the signboard with powder) the whole sign, wiping away the off-center part, moving the pattern to re-center the offending bit, then pouncing just that line again. If it sounds half as effing tedious as it is, I've done an adequate job describing it. Now, I fine-tune the design on screen (where the justify feature is my friend) and the plotter perforates a perfect pattern (say that three times fast!) This saves me a hell of a lot of time and labor, allowing me to let machines do the tedious work and letting me do the painting.

Still, I can't over emphasize the value of those years of doing everything by hand. Traditional methods force you to pay attention to details and to have an intimate acquaintance with letterforms like nothing else. No computer program will ever replace or substitute for those skills, even if after all these years I still can't see center.

2006-09-27T11:58:00.000-07:00

When I'm not painting signs I'm often out riding my restored 1972 Norton Combat Commando motorcycle. Norton was a British company founded in 1898, and was famed in racing circles from the twenties through the sixties. This beast has a high compression 750 cc vertical-twin engine with no electric starter - it's a man's motorcycle, designed, built and ridden by enthusiasts who loved bikes, loved riding and understood that a motorcycle isn't just a machine, it's a soul-satisfying, life-affirming experience. While it doesn't compete with modern Japanese repli-racers, a Commando was the dangerously fast sportbike of its day, and it doesn't really wake up and pay attention at speeds under 50 0r 60 mph. On the open road, give it a handful of throttle and it will grab you by the ass and go, and it isn't hard to find yourself at a buck ten or more passing semis and slow-poke Subarus on the interstate, and realize you are still accelerating. That's about as fast as I need to go on just about anything, not to mention a thirty-four year old motorcycle.

2006-09-27T11:51:00.000-07:00

After struggling to publish these pics yeaterday, now I get two of the same... These are also part of the Schooner Wharf project from 2003.

2006-09-27T11:47:00.000-07:00

Here's a pic of the Schooner Wharf project that i wrote about yesterday.

2006-09-26T08:01:00.000-07:00

This morning I stopped by the Mystic Chamber of Commerce, which is located at Schooner Wharf in Mystic. Schooner Wharf, finished in 2003, was my single largest sign project to date. There are six fairly large wall-mounted signs with gilded individual letters, all finished with 23k gold leaf, and two oval projecting signs, along with several signs for other businesses on the premises.

The large rectangular signs are all made with DiBond laminate and framed in cedar. The round-faced plastic letters are from Gemini Inc., and were gilded with 23k gold leaf imported from Germany. The project used three full packs of gold - each pack containing 500 leaves, 3&3/8 x 3&3/8 inches square, all hand-laid and burnished. There is really nothing that shows off the beauty and power of gold leaf more than large round-faced letters, and the Gemini letters are great because the smooth, consistent sufaces are an ideal substrate for gilding.

In the 19th and early 20th century, signs with raised gilded wood letters were the quality standard for outdoor signs. A larger sign shop might manufacture their own letters, while other shops would purchase them from manufacturers such as Spanjer Bros. of Chicago. Those letters were made of wood, usually pine, and were highly labor-intensive; the letter blanks had to be hand-carved and sanded to acheive the rounded profile. When finished, the letters were literally boiled in linseed oil as a preservative, then painted with several coats of white lead - a highly toxic, but extremely durable primer - then pained with several coats of enamel before, at last, being gilded. The painting process alone required several months - each coat of white lead took over a week to dry - with each coat being hand-sanded to acceptable smoothness before the next step. When the painting and gilding process was complete, the letters wood be screwed from their backs to the signboard, usually painted sheet metal with a wood frame. The traditional background for gold letters was black smalt, a fine-grained colored ground glass, which was adhered to the panel with glue. The results are striking - a smalt background displays gold letters with a look similar to gold jewelry on velvet. In the case of the Schooner Wharf signs, I had strongly encouraged the use of green or black smalt for the background, but was overruled by the client; these signs have a green enamel backround.

The use of gilded plastic letters, while not purely traditional, allows these signs to have the look of traditional wood-letter signs, without the labor costs required by the lengthy process of carving and painting wood letters.

2006-09-26T06:58:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we installed this hand-lettered sign for Dr. Chris Kiersko of Westerly Chiropractic. Dr. Chris is moving his offices and re-naming his practice, and had suggested the name on an angled panel; I designed the logo and sign based on that. The sign itself is DiBond, a laminate panel of aluminum with a polyvinyl core, that has become my hands-down favorite substrate for this type of job. The installation required the removal of an existing electric sign cabinet, a somewhat complicated process involving a rope sling to lower the cabinet from the roof, and insect spray to deal with the wasps that always seem to nest in these darn things! Helping me with this installation was my good friend Bob Rochon, whose own shop, Creative Signworks, is in Millbury, Massachusetts.

You can see more of my hand-lettered signs at www.finestkindsign.com

2006-09-25T12:58:00.000-07:00

Fall has arrived and with cold weather on its way, I reinstalled my coal stove today. This is a restored 19th century "pansy" stove, which burns anthracite, or hard, coal mined in Pennsylvania. With the price of propane - my other heat source - having gone ballistic in the last year or so, coal really makes sense. A 40 lb bag of anthracite costs $5, and in the coldest weather last year it burned a bag every two days and kept my shop comfortably warm and dry - that's important for paint to cure properly, not to mention keeping me warm enough to work. More than that, burning coal is a hands-on process - and if you've read much of this blog, you have already got a sense of how that fits my style and personality.

The stove came from a restoration shop in Rhode Island, with a website at www.antiquestovehospital.com. Owner Emory Pinero is an old-time swamp Yankee, living on a backroad in Little Compton, where he has a couple of barns and sheds overflowing with what to the untrained eye, looks like rusted junk. To Emory, this junk is all bits and pieces of old stoves - grates, doors, fireboxes and the like - from dozens of mostly New England manufacturers, all long defunct. He cleans and sandblasts the pieces, makes new parts when necessary, and restores stoves to like-new or better-than-new condition. If you have ever wanted an old stove or just like old and unusual stuff, check out the antique stove hospital.

2006-09-25T11:54:00.000-07:00

This is one of two matching signs for the Weekapaug Golf Club in Westerly, Rhode Island, that were finished and installed in June. The signs are SignFoam HDU material, with the background carved and the letterfaces cut to a prismatic shape. the backgrounds were then finished in green smalt, a crushed colored-glass material, which gives the background a soft, velvety appearance. Letter are finished with 23k Gold Leaf.

For a look at some of our other carved signs, visit www.finestkindsign.com

2006-09-25T07:09:00.000-07:00

These are closups of the glass sign showing the detail of the etching in the letters.

2006-09-25T06:36:00.000-07:00

I'm not much of an antique collector, but once in a while a piece comes along that I've just got to have. Such is the case with this beautiful glass sign, which came to me through Stonington antique dealer Bill Clark. The lettering of Boulevard Velvet and the outlines of the shield and the red AWB letters is gold leaf, with centers that look to be acid-etched, and the background is painted in black enamel. The grey patch in front of the V is where the enamel has peeled from the back of the glass; otherwise this is in extraordinary condition. A.W.B. stands for Augustus B. Wimpfheimer, whose family owned the Wimpfheimer velvet mill in Stonington since the 1880s. From the wavyness of the glass, Bill thinks this sign dates from the 1890s, and at one time it would have been displayed in the company's sales office in New York.

2006-09-22T08:05:00.000-07:00

This is a job just finished about two weeks ago , replacing a sign that I first did in 1998. The original sign was built with solid 2" thick SignFoam High Density Urethane, and was installed with steel bars that ran down the sides of the sign. It lasted eight years, until broken by vandals in June. The replacement sign is slightly smaller, but the big difference is in construction. The new sign was built with two separate faces, laminated over an internal frame of 1/4" x 1 1/2" steel, which runs all the way through the sign, allowing for a smaller sign to hang below it. The curved framing on the top of the original sign was also HDU; on the new sign this is mahogany. These changes will make the sign far less vulnerable to being shattered by a single blow, which was the unfortunate fate of the original sign.

Design-wise, this sign has some interesting features. Aside from the classic V-carved lettering, the background of the leaf-and-branch motif is carved away, and the texture of the leaves is also lightly carved to resemble the natural veining. To achieve the unique reddish coloring of the European copper beech, the leaves are gilded with pure copper (metal) leaf, then glazed with a clear varnish tinted with a mixture of green and brown, before a final coat of UV urethane clearcoat. The same copper is used as an accent on the edges of the sign, then also clearcoated, as copper will tarnish if left unprotected. The lettering is finished with 23k gold leaf. This sign is a great example of the classic hand-carved signs that have earned Finest Kind Signs its reputation for quality and value.

2006-09-20T15:25:00.000-07:00

This being my first experience with blogging and website creation, I'm learning a lot as I go. The website is almost done though the domain name - www.finestkindsign.com - has had an unexpected problem with the registry.
It's now past six pm, and I'm expected home, so with apologies for the banality of this post, I retire.

2006-09-20T13:08:00.000-07:00

While our official website at www.finestkindsigns is all about contact info and the photos of work we've done, it is by design somewhat static - semi-permanent photos and text. The blog is much more personal, immediate and behind-the scenes. In it I talk about signs and design, but you're also likely to get my opinions on the local zoning board, the Red Sox, and motorcycles, among other things. You'll see pictures of signs in the works, the shop, Augie the Doggie, and whatever else I feel like posting. I have a lot of interests aside from signs, and I get a kick out of being able to share them here.

About the whole hand lettering thing.
Here's a sign related subject I get passionate about, so this is a perfect "first post" for the blog. I'm a practitioner of a dying trade, that of the traditional sign painter. Technology, in the form of computer-driven vinyl cutters, routers and large format inkjet printers, have made my brushes, paints, and mahlstick virtually obsolete - yet though I have and use technology, I have made a conscious decision to produce the majority of my work by hand, using traditional materials. Why? Well, the best way to explain it is that having learned this elemental part of the trade back in the 80s, I have a deep appreciation for what's involved. Learning to letter with a brush is probably one of the most difficult activities a person can attempt, requiring the development of fine motor skills, an eye for detail, and a sense of rythm and proportion. The letterer has to be able to feel the viscousity of the paint in the brush, the response of the brush to the painting surface, the flow of the paint from the brush, how that flow is altered and controlled by the presure and movement of the fingers.
That's the technical side of it, but the real reason I keep doing it is all in my head. Everything else in this trade has been made faster easier - with plotters, printers, CNC routers, etc. - but not brush lettering. As I said, learning to letter is extremely difficult. It requires long hours of practice - an oldtime signman once estimated that to competently paint a letter "O" under two inches high required approximately two thousand hours of practice. There are no shortcuts, no special tricks, just diligence and patience. Brush lettering can't be learned in a weekend, or from a seminar, and in a very real sense it cannot even be taught. The only thing that can be taught is how to practice; the would-be letterer has to find the time, and develop the patience and discipline to practice...and practice...and practice.
Sounds pretty horrible, doesn't it? In my case, practice was all after hours at the shop where I worked in Phoenix, Arizona from 1985 to 1988. My boss and mentor, Brad Lindsey, often worked late, and I would frequently stay into the evening, practicing at the bench on old newspapers. Those evenings - talking to Brad, listening to his stories of childhood in South Carolina, the smell of paint and the background of country music on the radio - will always be some of my best memories. But the best part of all that practice is the magical moment when it starts to work - when after hundreds of smeared and crooked brushstrokes, suddenly the paint and the brush and your fingers start to cooperate, and the strokes flow from the brush exactly as you imagined. It's not that you suddenly are a competent letterer, but the light appears at the end of the tunnel, and from this point the practice becomes easier, and as it becomes easier, it also becomes more compelling.
As hand lettering becomes rare, it also becomes more valuable - but in the end the reason I do it is because I like it. As any good brush letterer can tell you, lettering is its own reward. It's a relaxing, unhurried, focused activity with it's own rythm, timing, and some say, swing, that defies explanation. I personally love lettering on a warm summer evening at the shop, when the phone doesn't ring, the Red Sox are on the radio and the peepers out in the marsh are all singing for love. Betcha there's not too many jobs you can say that about.

For a person starting out in the sign trade today, there's no real incentive to learn lettering by hand. The machines can do it all - but in doing so, they seperate the humanity and skill and pride from the end result, and turn the sign into a commodity. A hand lettered sign, on the other hand, is a connection to the letterer; to his skills, those long hours of practice, and ultimately to the satisfaction and joy taken from the work itself. There's a word for all that, a very overused word that is applied to many things, but is really all about one basic human need. That word is Art.