Making large cutout signs

Making a large cutout sign is quite fun actually. Today we made a large cutout of a guy on on snowmobile. Here is how we did it:

First of all we had to make the file in photoshop. We took an image of a snowmobiler and sized it up to one fourth of the correct size as 300 dpi. The size of the cutout was going to be 8 Feet Tal by 16 feet wide.

After sizing up the image to the correct size. I used a photoshop brush with a lot of randomity and drew around the snowmobiler, I used what I drew to make a mask of the image. once that was done I was able to send it to the print rip software. After that I set the tiles for 59 inches each and sent the file to the printer.

After the file had finished ripping (Raster Image Processing) and printing, we took each of the printouts and laminated them onto half-inch Gatorboard. Then we took a Router with a cutting bit and followed the shape. To have a good surface to cut the shape out, we had to put the gatorboard pieces on a thick piece of foam so that we could just use the router without worrying about what was underneath getting destroyed.

The final thing we did was lay all 3 of the pieces out side by side and made sure that they looked like one piece. Here you can see the final sign (its actually 3 pieces, put together):

Applying Signage to trains (Vehicle Signage)

We got this job to create graphics for a train.

The first thing we did was take a picture of an old train and designed the graphics similar to the old train but different. We found some roma tomatoes graphics on a stock photo site and then we laid the design out. Here is the design before it was put on the train.

After we designed it, we had to print it out at 8 Feet High by 14 Feet wide. After we printed it we laminated it with a cold laminate.

When the lamination was done, we put it back into the printer (which also cuts) and realigned it and then cut it out.

Now that sounds easy, but there was more to do than meets the eye. In order for the printer to be able to create the cut, I had to draw the cut line in illustrator.

So here is how I did it: First I used the pathfinder to merge all of the text and vector artwork. Then I took the tomatoes in Photoshop and made a selection of them and reduced the selection by a couple of pixels so that when the printer went to cut it, if it was off there was some bleed on the graphics. After that I turned the selection into a path and exported it into an illustrator path. I then open it and put it in the illustrator file and merged that path with the graphics. I then added thick strokes to the original vector artwork so that it had bleed as well. For all this hard work, we got the print/cut right. But we still had to install it.

The next step was to weed the background out (Vinyl) and apply application tape over the vinyl.

The next day, we went out to where the trains are kept (which was far away) and we went to work. The first thing we did was measure the train so that we could make sure we placed the artwork correctly. Then we taped the artwork pieces to the train and peeled off the application tape.

After the vinyl was mostly stuck to the train we went around each rivet and pushed the vinyl around it with our fingers so that it wrapped around the rivets tightly. You can see the vinyl on the rivets here:












When this was done we aged the artwork using aging techniques I mentioned in an earlier blog post on this blog. That was it, it was sort of fun to apply this artwork to a train and I enjoyed it. The hardest part was getting it ready to put onto the train.

Here is the finished artwork.

Making aged signs (Old Signs)

Today I will talk about aged signs, otherwise know as old signs. How do you make a new sign look aged? Well I just recently learned something about that.

We did some Italian Signs. We first designed them. I was given a picture of how the signs looked. I then went into Adobe Illustrator and recreated the signs. I drew then exactly how the pictures showed them.

I then printed the sign of on our Large format printer (Roland). We printed them on a matte vinyl so they were not shiny.

Now for the aging. If you take a rusty reddish paint and water it down, you can spray it onto the sign and let it drip down. If it is too much you can spray Windex on it to make it thinner. You can also oxidize the sign by using a whitish yellowish paint, really watered down and spray it on there. When it dries, the sign will look oxidized.

Here are some examples of the aging work we did: