Hand Painted Lettering

[HopCar]

I respect your decision to use paint instead of vinyl. Paint always look classier to me. Of course if you want the best, go with gold leaf!

There was a woman in Miami that painted boat names topless. Funny I don’t remember what she looked like.

[coopec43]

She looked like this.

[Iron E]

Originally Posted by HopCar

I respect your decision to use paint instead of vinyl. Paint always look classier to me. Of course if you want the best, go with gold leaf!

There was a woman in Miami that painted boat names topless. Funny I don’t remember what she looked like.

Fun fact: 22k gold leaf vinyl is available. Sign Gold Vinyl is used on Fire trucks.

Other facts/considerations:
Any time a boat sign is painted, it's permanent. The sign lettering cannot easily be removed and will be seen unless the transom and/or topsides are stripped to gel coat.
Scuffs, dings, docking bumps, etc., will need to be repaired by a sign painter because colors change after one season.

There are other reasons people opt for vinyl over paint, but I think the biggest reason is that a good sign person can layout and install high-quality vinyl signage that 99% of people wouldn't know is vinyl. And honestly, if you can tell if a painted sign is painted, i.e., brush strokes, highs and lows, etc., then the sign painter isn't very good.

[HopCar]

Originally Posted by coopec43

She looked like this.

That’s her! Didn’t know she had a face.

[HopCar]

One of my employees bought a boat with her husband that they chartered in the Bahamas in the late forties. The boats name was Olad. She wanted to change it to Whistlebinkee. She found out what the gold leaf would cost. I think it’s still sailing under the name Olad in Maine.

[djousset]

I love that you want to hand paint the name. In a world of prefab/off-the-shelf/ready-to go/fast-and-easy it's the slow-down-free-hand that wins for me. Go for it!

[Foswick]

Originally Posted by Iron E

... if you can tell if a painted sign is painted, i.e., brush strokes, highs and lows, etc., then the sign painter isn't very good.

I disagree with that. To me, it's a bit like the difference between wood and plastic. If you want perfection and consistency: plastic. But, it is the imperfection of wood that makes it attractive. If you can't see the grain, then what's the point?

If a sign painter wants to attain machine-like perfection, then they should use a machine. When I was doing commercial art, we used rubdown lettering when we wanted to quickly produce lettering in a consistent font and style. But, if you wanted a unique piece of art, you had to do it by hand.

The thing is, if I were to use vinyl, I would hand-produce a unique image and have that transferred to vinyl ... to transfer to my boat. From a distance, it would probably look hand painted, but up close you would see that it was printed plastic meant to look as if it were hand painted.

Again, I am not anti-vinyl. There are some great looking boats with some great looking vinyl. I have a Catalina. That's a boat that wants clean lines and a slick aesthetic. But, to my eye, putting something slick on a boat that is trying to embrace a traditional aesthetic - it just looks off.

This is an interesting read about the death and revival of the sign painting industry: https://craftsmanship.net/the-new-sign-painters/

That article inspired me to have a go at this, myself after a few practice runs on a wall. One of my concerns with attempting this was the inability to rest my hand against the hull, necessitating that not only hand be steady, but my whole arm.

Then I saw this person with a brilliant trick: https://youtu.be/OGLWwSmDrbc

[Bowdrie]

Originally Posted by djousset

I love that you want to hand paint the name. In a world of prefab/off-the-shelf/ready-to go/fast-and-easy it's the slow-down-free-hand that wins for me. Go for it!

I agree.
Vinyl is so gauche.
I hired a pro who did boat lettering, it was money well spent.
Hint; use a stock color, no custom color mix.

[Bill_Giles]

I’ve carved signs and it is fairly simple to print the letters out in the font and size you like. A hobby knife and a sharp chisel to carve the letters which are then picked out in gold and the whole then varnished.

[donradcliffe]

The boat name painter wandered by this week and gave us his card. He said the Home Port needed touching up, but the guy could barely walk down the dock and I think his steady hand days are over.

[Thomas1985]

After you hone your skills on your boat shoot me a message so you can come do mine!

[CarinaPDX]

I'm with you - traditional painting can be unique and beautiful. I was lucky enough to know a sign painter who was building a sister ship and offered to do both the design and painting for a very attractive price. Having drawn a full size sample on paper, he marked the transom by pouncing. That is, he laid the paper on a screen and used a wire brush to penetrate the paper wherever paint would be used. He then taped the perforated paper to the transom and pounced a bag full of charcoal dust onto the paper to mark the transom with a light bit of charcoal. First, he painted the name itself with a lacquer and when sticky applied gold leaf. He painted a shadow with light gray paint, and finally a thin outline of the gold leaf with Prussian Blue. It was, and is, beautiful. I have had to re-gilt a couple of times - it is important to keep a good coating of varnish atop the gold.

When I first got the name applied I took a photo and paid a commercial art student to make the black-on-white photographic pattern (?) with an outline of the transom, which I used for stationery, business cards, rubber stamp, and embroidered shirts. Later, when I had a computer, I scanned them in but quickly realized that the hand work just didn't look right in today's world of perfect computer-generated graphics. So I made a new pattern with Bezier curves that looks good enough for contemporary use. It has all been a lot of fun.

Edit: use sign paint - it is wonderful stuff. It flows well, covers well, and just looks great.

Greg

[GafferMate]

Originally Posted by Foswick

I am having the hull painted on my boat and will be painting the name on the transom.

I went to art school a million years ago, when we used to do all lettering by hand because computer typography just wasn't a thing yet. So, back in the day, I wouldn't have thought twice about doing this myself. But, painting the side of a boat is a bit different, and my hand is not as steady as it used to be.

So, in all likelihood, I'll pay someone to do this for me. But, before I give up on it altogether, I am trying to get some good information about how to do it well. I'm actually not finding much in the way of information about paint selection, tools, and tricks of the trade.

Any advice?

No need to pay someone. You (and anyone else) can do it even if not as perfect as a machine.



My father, a gifted artist that supported his family of wife and four daughters as a sign painter/goldleaf & neon lights extraordinaire, taught us how to letter:



1.You can incorporate computer fonts to design the type face and size for the name, print it and tape together whatever number of pages are needed.
2. At an art store or online buy a "ROULTETTE Wheel" --a spikey wheel on a handle--and use it to punch even holes into the paper as you use it to trace the outline of your boat's name.
3. Tape pattern flat to hull of boat.

4. Put some blue chalk powder (used for striking lines on flat surfaes) into a square of cloth and rubber band it into a ball you can use to PONCE the chalk through the holes

5. Remove pattern.
6, Lay a line of masking tape along top & bottom edges of the name.
7. Feel free to also tape any straight lines you fear might be wiggly. Practice making curves prior because tape won't work as well for them. Use a good quality sable brush, flat not round, the width of your typeface or a smidgen smaller if you are inclined to press more than just the tip of the brush and paint onto the hull.

8. Tape the end of a 3' x 1/2" dowel into a ball to lay against the hull, the other end held in the opposite hand you paint with. Use this balance beam to steady your hand as you paint.
9. As you lay paint on the surface, following just inside the blue chalk dots, look AHEAD where you want to go, not where you are painting. Lead your brush with your eye and it will gracefully follow where you expect it to go.

10. Trust yourself.


Thank you for this opportunity to pass on this tribute to the old ways, as I pass through my own years of antiquity.

[kipwrite]

For those on the US east coast, Sean at Providence Painted Signs (RI) painted the name on my sailboat "Lilia" in 2016. Did a beautiful job - much nicer than vinyl in my opinion. Guy's a genius. providencepaintedsigns@gmail.com

[GrowleyMonster]

I suggest if you want to DIY it, first learn about SVG or Scalable Vector Graphics files. As the name suggests, you can scale up or down with no pixelation or other effects because unlike ordinary raster scan images that address individual or groups of pixels, the points and line segments of an SVG image have no width. It is all mathematical. So you can make a very nice font or an individual glyph for a letter on your computer, then print it any size you want, to make a stencil. Position the stencil or stencils to your liking, and when you are satisfied, trace them with a pencil on the hull. Now you have a perfect outline within which you can hand-letter with an artist's brush, and while there will of course be touches of imperfection to the eye up close, at a distance it will look very symmetrical, consistent, and professional.

My vector art program of choice is Inkscape, very popular in the Linux community but also available for winDOHs, I believe.