A Piece of My Mind: The Village Shops

Newsagents corner

The Bakery and Newsagent builds were the first pieces to come through from the carpentry workshop.
As Luisa prepared the doily, Karen tackled the 60's wallpaper design on the Bakery. I looked towards my first attempt at lettering for the Newsagents.

It's funny, but when I started thinking of how to do the lettering, I found myself looking at shopfronts. Most shops fronts are printed digitally now and you very rarely see one that's been hand painted.
Signwriting may just be a dying art. For shop fronts at least.
After watching a few videos on you tube of the masters at work I realised there still is a fair amount of work still available to this elite group of artists.
I found this link to a signwriter free stylin' ^^ I love the artists chatter while he works :P

I primed and measured out the trim round the Newsagents sign and worked out the height of the letters. I used an overhead projector to project the letters onto the shop front. This helped with the letter spacing.
Two things I came to consider when I started painting in the letters. The consistency of the paint and the brush I was using.

set of typical signwriting brushes

Lettering looks cleaner with less strokes, so I tried to curve the paint round the letters. If the paint was thinned it would spread more easily - but too thin and I would need to add a few coats.
Most of the signwriters I've watched use long brushes. They curve the brush around the letter. I had a shorter brush so it took me a few strokes to clear a curve.
Also I was using a diffrent type of paint. Signwriters prefer enamel paint - an oil based varnish, which can be coloured with oil paints and thinned to spread farther. I, however, was using acryllics - water based and fast drying.

This was my first attempt at lettering.

Time for some dirty weathering and legs attached.

I dirtied the front using a combination of dirty coloured wash, sponge and rolled on some glaze with a textured roller. Karen brought a little of the base colour back in to create the illusion of chipped paint.

It's not absolutely perfect, which is my prefered standard, heh.. (Oh to be able to cut yourself some slack when you suffer from perfectionism!) ..however I have to learn to move on as there is a stream of things ready to be painted about to erupt upon the Paintshop.

meanwhile in another corner of Paintshop... Karen had been slaving away in the Bakery.

The reference showed a funky retro pattern on the appartment above the Bakery.
It was a geomeric repeated pattern, so Karen made a pounce of the part that is repeated and used it to place and quickly replicate the pattern onto the Bakery wall as per the reference.

I loved what Karen did here. It looks exactly like the model. She added a dark wash to the top and bottom which in turn added some light to the middle.

Karen moved on to paint the pub sign and I had my second shot at lettering on the Bakery. I put a little glaze this time in with the paint and it helped to spread the paint further but not dilute the colour too much.
oh and I now realised how useful a long handled brush can be and why in fact the manufacturers have included that extra peice of wood.
It was far easier to get round an 'O' having a longer reach - somehow it felt easier and I started to prefer the letters that had curves. I am loving the 'B' :D

A wee shadow and highlight.

and the wee sign at the side. We had a few wee signs to paint, so I'd asked the carpentry dept to cut those as soon as they could as we would benefit from having them painted.

fine baking!

The Bakery got it's dirty treatment as per the model, with a special request from Anna for a dirty window :)

It would be fair to mention and applaud the props department for their contribution to Albert Herring.
They have created a banquet table complete with the most appetizing fake food and cakes that'll surely have audience members mouths watering.They've made and painted enough fruit and veg to open a fake fruit market. Myself and Matt (managing for props) have kept in contact and helped each other out where we could.
Both the props and carpentry workshops have felt like an extended family to me to a point there is no divide anymore. Happy times :)

so there you go! 2 shops painted. The villagers will be awfy happy :)