A new client last year gave us the opportunity to do some gilding for an art gallery in St James Square, London. Recently we have also hand painted some large yellow suns in Marylebone and Notting Hill in memory of a famous café owner. Then we were asked to work at Sally Clarke’s in Kensington. This is a coffee shop, selling all hand made food and pastries and they have a restaurant over the road. This month is 40 years since the shop was set up and they are opening a café on the corner. We were asked to water gild lettering and lines on 4 windows with 2 sets of lettering – Clarke’s Corner Café. Removal of existing gold leaf and back painted glass, although sad enabled the new designs for the windows to be started. Lots of glass cleaning and scraping, both sides of course so no errors are made assuming a blemish is on the outside, then it isn’t! We used a different approach with these designs as the coachline was at its longest 1700mm. We applied removable vinyl lines and lettering to the glass and then painted over this in gloss paint. While it was drying, within 30 mins we removed the vinyl leaving clear glass. The next day, when all dry, we degreased the clear glass again and started gilding the clear lines. Carefully cutting each loose leaf into 4 we could then carefully lift these onto the glass that we have just dripped the gold size onto. Bearing in mind, each gold leaf cut into 4 lengths covered approximately 320mm. This is a process that just cant be rushed as even the slightest breath can blow the gold leaf off the gilding pad or even if someone opens a door! Normally this process would involve gilding straight onto the glass then signwriting the letters and detail over the back, cleaning off the surrounding gold then back paint over all this. Some people are against using modern technology with old processes, but I truly believe that if it achieves the end result and a better result then why not. Gilding these lines was a real task, knowing that the next day we had to gild them again to cover any gaps. It does play with your head a bit as its such a long process where in some cases you can’t see the end. However, when done again and you walk outside and see the solid gold finish, it gives so much satisfaction especially when the public ask and comment how beautiful it all is. The 3rd day was finishing off the lines and then gilding the letters, twice of course. 4th and final day was to burnish all the gold, checking for any gaps. It was handy getting to site at 630am in the dark so with the lights on inside it made it easier to spot any. We then marked these with tape and gilded. Turning up the heating in the shop allowed the gold to dry quick. Final job was to mask up all round and then repaint all over each design in gloss black, laying off vertically so no runs. Water gilding is a slow process that can’t be rushed, it can be painful when gilding with gaps and gold blowing in the slightest breeze, but when finished gives so much pleasure to myself seeing the end result that will be there for years to come. Satisfactions is guaranteed. 😊

Having the opportunity to work with Pret doing all the signwriting for their Southern outlets, we soon realised how they loved signwriting on painted brick. These projects involve smaller 100mm letters up to 200mm letters painted onto brickwork. We use our paper pounce that is an outline of the letters with holes and use a pounce pad that is filled with charcoal or chalk that we rub over the drawing and it transfers the outline for us to follow. Now, these bricks aren’t real, they are brick slips, fibreglass and in some cases very distressed. They are not like old painted brick that becomes smooth with paint over the years. Using a brush over the brick gives a very rough outline of where and how the letter is formed and then we use a very small, and in some cases a tired old 3mm long brush to then fill in and push the paint into the gaps. This can take time. Lots of these Pret jobs are refurbishments so they are open during the day and we work at night and so you have to finish what you started, there is no chance of leaving half a message! One particular message, 5 lines of letters took me 5 hours to signwrite, total commitment to the job in hand, the trick is to focus and relax. Something not that easy with sciatica but a conversation with my wife, taking my mind off pain helped immensely. Signwriting is a very intimate thing – as it's just you, a brush and a wall, and the world carries on behind you as it does on these jobs with people doing other works or installing signs. At the end of the night, you can look back and admire what you have achieved and soak up all the nice comments you received while signwriting. Then, there is the 6½ hour brick. This is exactly the same message, same size, colour and 5 lines of text, the only difference is the brick. On this wall the brick is very open and porous and therefore when signwriting, the outline of the letter only puts a small amount of paint down which means more filling in with the old tired brush! I was there all night on this and so it didn’t matter. However, one thing worth remembering when pricing this type of work is that not all bricks are the same and if you are not able to see the brick type then allow for the worst case scenario, I teach this to my students all the time. The smaller lettering, normally in blue, with a red star can take 2-3 hours. The other week when on a Pret job I was told I have ‘patience of a saint’ and I agree. 😊

Nowadays we have so much at our fingertips that we are completely spoilt. I truly believe that a lot of new people entering the industry may think that it has always been this way and that we have always had routers, font finders, colour matching systems, rolls rollers and digital printers, just to name but a few. If only this was the case. I refer to it when on social media where someone was asking what the name of a particular font was. I had a look and after a few moments I remembered back to my signwriting days and recognised the font as Modern No20. Then I thought I wonder how many other people could recognise fonts. Different, when in the design industry as you are using them to create the design. But in the sign industry nowadays you see them every day, but do you know what they are. In fact with the speed of works going through on a daily basis, do people really care? There are websites now capable of recognising a font! I remember in the late 80’s looking back through a letraset book to find a font, sometimes this would take an hour or more just so we could then draw it up, by hand of course or but in some letraset and enlarge with an epidiascope. After speaking with some colleagues, not quite as old as me the other day, we said that it would be interesting if you demonstrated how signs used to have lettering applied. Not going back to signwriting but applying vinyl lettering using a scaled drawing that was done off the vinyl machine software or off the clients artwork using a scaled ruler or working out the factor. I am sure they would be amazed at how long this would take compared to applying a digital print with a rolls roller. So that also made me think of how we make signs, flat panels easy, if you have the appropriate wall saw or flatbed saw. I do remember cutting many a foamex panel by hand and have the scars to prove this. But again with the introduction of routers for cutting letters and shapes and now the amazing and extremely fast Kongsberg cutting tables, this enables extremely quick turnaround of products with excellent edge finishes. 3 dimensional signs have also come on with the introduction of automatic letter builders for 3 dimensional letters, this eliminates the use of bending and shaping the letter by hand and therefore enabling a quicker turnaround. Again over the years I have seen how this has been done by hand and appreciate the skill involved. Don’t get me wrong many companies still make them this way successfully and may not even entertain the automated option. So, it is all about appreciation, there are some companies that aren’t lucky enough to have such modern technology and some that wouldn’t even go near it. They are just happy with what they have as it works for them and has done for years. Next time you make a sign, take a moment to think about what the sign means to you, means to the client and more importantly what went in to making the sign as it could have taken 30 minutes or 30 hours depending on how you made it and what skills and technology was used.

To be honest, lots of people ask this and think that we have been going longer than 4 years, possibly my grey hair and beard! In a nutshell, I was in fact self employed in 1994, back in the £8 per hour days, working for myself and also subcontracting to other sign companies. I have worked all over the industry with the last big encounter with AJ Wells & Sons on the Isle of Wight working with vitreous enamel. With what I have learned over the 39 years in the industry I just poured into the company I was with at the time in 2019. Then after frustrations where I was currently working, the time came to do my own thing but with no real plan, just to get clients and service them well and build on that. Feb 2020 was when it all started and when one of the ‘copy and paste’ emails came back with a positive reply, thank you Whole Foods Market. This start gave us the real energy to get going and start telling people what we do. The pandemic was a slight issue but I kept myself busy doing other things as well. We started with all the social media posts to start to see what could happen and just kept talking to people and it seems to have worked, we don’t take it for granted. We pride ourselves on doing a good job and being ‘real’ people with very good morals and people like that and have picked up on this too.  We like to work on recommendations and in some cases have been recommended by people we haven’t even met or worked with! There are ups and downs but its all hard work and if you build on your relationships with clients we have found that this pays dividends. They say that most companies fail in there first 3 years and this is our 4th and we believe if we carry on as we are we will do ok 😊