I was asked to create an entrance sign for a graduation open house. I had this large hog panel that was about 3’x5′ and it seemed perfect. A hog panel is basically a white board on plywood, typically used for the walls of hog barns. It was nice and heavy and wouldn’t blow away if placed outside in the wind, and seemed large enough to be seen from the road. While a large canvas would’ve absolutely worked better, I didn’t have one on me at the moment and the hog panel was free! (And clean ;D)
I started out by sketching some ideas down. The theme of the open house was English Breakfast Tea Party so I was thinking some flowing fonts and pastel flowers.
Medium: Painting
Supplies: Hog panel, acrylic paints, brushes, printer paper, tape, scissors
Tips & Tricks: A trick I thought of right away was to create cut-outs of the letters I was going to use, stencils if you will. I taped them in their respective places, and painting the delicate serif fonts was so much easier than trying to do it freehand. And while I made no stencils for the cursive font, the trick for that is to not care so much if it looks messy 🙂 Try to get into the zone without thinking about how it’s going to look like and you’ll find that’s immensely easier. If a huge mistake is made, then using a painting knife or credit card can scrape it off easily.
Pitfalls (aka what I learned the hard way): As expected, acrylic paint does not go on white board material very well. I needed to apply many, many layers. Some of the layers of paint I had were so thick that they would peel off when pulling the stencils away and so I would have to go over with another coat of paint. This can be avoidable if the stencil is removed before the paint dries completely.
Outcome: The outcome was quite lovely. The flowers were my favorite to paint just because I could be a bit more carefree with them. Shading the flowers was simple, I just used a darker version of the paint for the shadows and let the white of the hog panel filter in as the highlights.