A Piece of My Mind: The Village Shops - The Butcher's and some advertising signs.


The sign of The Cock

With Karen busy painting a bird on the pub sign 'The Cock' :)
I started work on the Butchers shop front, leaving Luisa to some intricate painting on the 'Walls' ice cream sign.

When I was priming the front of the Butcher's, Gary gave me the idea of merging 2 steps with one and painting a little 'light' onto the surface.

Looking at the model helped me create a history of the piece. The shops paint job had been affected by weathering and left only some of the original paint visible. Where the paint had faded, the colour took on a green tone. This gave me the answer on what colours to paint the background.
I blended a warm colour towards the middle and faded it out to a pale green. Gary explained that this should help the lighting design as we have created a little lighting of our own! Passing on the love! :D

I did the same with the blue on the sides of the shop - this time merging 2 blues together and left it a little patchy. This again gave the paint finish a weathered look. I blocked in the blue bar text background as I wanted the letters to be crisp and readable from a distance.
There was a joke in the text, so it was important that it was seen.

This was my third attempt at lettering. I had found the longest bristle brush from my collection (which was about half the length of a sign writers brush), learned to lock my elbow steady against something and I really enjoyed trying to swish round those curved letters.
The writing was so thin, most of the challenge was trying to spread out the bristles to the same degree with every letter making the letters all the same width, with limited brush strokes.
It was always possible to bring the blue in again if it all went horribly wrong, but it turned out pretty good.

When it came to painting the Shop title 'Upfolds' the model showed a reasonably bright red.

Gary pointed out that red can be overbearing to adjacent colours and since there were two lines of readable text on the sign and also the writing was to appear weathered, I should add a little green to the red I was going to use to make it darker.

I might as well at this point talk a little on colour mixing. It's something I've had a lack of confidence with since I came to the scenic department, but now its starting to become clearer. I have wasted paint and made a mess learning - hah! - but the penny is finally dropping.

There is no black and white with colour mixing (excuse the pun) but there are some general rules to follow.
- Adding a color's complementary colour moves the colour nearer its opposite. i.e. green to red, makes red less red and darker.
- adding white lightens the colour but reduces the vibrancy. - makes it more chalky)
- adding black darkens the colour but again reduces the colour vibrancy.

I always refer now to the colour wheel - I found the Quiller wheel the most useful. It allows you to follow a colurs path when mixing it with another.
I might do a separate post on colour mixing at some point as it deserves a whole thread to itself.

Back to the Butchers.. made my red a little darker and now it's ready to be dirtied.

with added dirty

While I was busy with this, Luisa did a fine job of painting an advertisement for the Newsagents.

We had 3 shop signs to create. The Bakery 'Best baps', the Lions Maid and Walls Icecream sign.
Luisa fancied the Walls sign above, as she reckoned it'd be a wee challenge to paint - with all the writing.
As time was a issue in the schedule we decided to print out the Lions Maid.

Finshed with the Walls sign, Luisa move on to the Butcher roof.

We cut a piece of canvas from one of the panto's cloths. We found a bit that had hardly any paint on it and recycled it into the Butchers roof.
Luisa measured out and stretched the canvas onto the floor and used basic trigonometry to ensure the rectangle had right angles.
Measured and snapped the lines. The stripes were a combination of paint with a water wash. Like before Luisa tried to merge 2 steps into one by creating the weathered look in one step.