You Is kind Sign

Happy Friday Readers!

We've got another in-house feature for you today.  Laura is a pro sign maker as well as stenciller, and she made this sign for her daughter Mae's bedroom.  The sign is a quote from The Help, by the way.  It's a great movie. 

I wanted to highlight it because she used a particular technique that really looks sharp.

She uses varied coats of paint to create a shadow effect.  All you need to do is reapply the stencil with different color paint and offset by a tiny bit so you can see the layers of paint.  

Now this particular sign uses a font that is outlined to begin with, so there're some serious layers going on.  It gives the text a wonderful depth.  You can see here in the detail picture that the word 'Mommy' is just the two layers of paint with the offset.

Here's a process picture so you can see how applying the second layer of paint goes.  There's really nothing to it.  That big blob on the right side of the picture is just where she has extra paint to work with.

 

This last picture shows what the breaks look like not filled in in a layered stencil.  Breaks (some stencillers call them islands) are the little bits of plastic that keep cutaways from falling apart in a stencil.  Lots of people never go back and fill in the spots where there isn't any paint from breaks, it's totally personal preference.   It just looks kind of wonky in this particular application.

Mae loved the sign, of course. 

You can check out the "You is Kind" stencil and other subway art stencils here at our store.

That's all we've got for this week.  One birthday party, two one year molars, and one buttercream layer cake later, I am spent!

See you next week!