Do-it-yourself sign making with Three Hills and friends.
Tricia Bowden and her friend, Philly** brought our vision to life with this awesome Whistle Up The Bay inspired design and color palette. Our challenge was to scale it up to a 4′ x 8′ sign with zero budget or sign making experience.
**Phil Detloff is his real name, and he’s a real graphic artist. We are thrilled with the designs he created for us and highly recommend him. LOVE it!
Lexi, Dave, & Shane did a bit of strategizing and practicing with the old sign. Lexi is saying, “Let’s use a grid system,” and Dave is saying, “I can free-hand that s**t.”Father and daughter snapping chalk lines.Mmmm…. pretty blue paint.
Our beautiful daughter and sign painter.Meanwhile, Dave cut down the cross beam, but kept the side posts and existing sign frame.Pretty as a picture.Our neighbor, Chuck, donated a ballast to get the whole No Vacancy sign working properly.Lexi painted happy little trees.The first layer of paint took a few days to dry.Therese painstakingly and meticulously traced and spaced my homemade paper letter stencils and Dave painted them in.Therese came back yesterday to help me paint walls in three rooms, and then helped Dave put the sign in the frame while I stood around taking pictures.
Finished with this part for the day. Passersby were honking and giving Dave the “Thumbs Up.”Dave had band practice, so I spent part of the evening making the lamp post stencil. I traced the outline from the logo with Photoshop Elements, saved it as an eps file, then enlarged and printed it as a banner in Publisher. Perhaps not the most elegant way to have done it, but it worked.Dave applied the paper stencil to the sign this morning.Traced around the stencil with pencil.Then he filled it in with white paint.He’s a lefty.He has a good eye and a steady hand.
Cleaning up the job site.And Voila! Welcome to the Atwood Inn!
