Here's a peek at how I design my boards.
As I am more used to digital work now, I tend to layout out my artwork before I even touch the board it self. For this piece below, with graphic design, prelayout, and then permanent overlay, I spent a total of around 8 hours straight on this piece, literally no breaks! I was that into it. The last 30 mins I spent on it was in the parking lot at the del mar station after I had gone to the art store to buy a new red pen to fill in the red space on the design. Good thing the board was already blank and prepped or that would be more time for cover and drying.
The Luggage Room Pizzeria is promoting their new italian creamery with this new board. The company gave me their gelato's logo image as a reference but I don't think they were expecting it to be on it though... When they saw it, they were very pleased, at least, that's what they said!
So as I said above, to start off most of my boards, I digitally layout the artwork in a graphic program, depending on the file type I receive I use either Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator, which ever works best at the moment. For this piece I used Photoshop because the logo image was a .JPG. After whipping together the layout quickly I use chalk to prep the board to align the writings and image to where I want everything place. Remember, if you would to do this your self, don't sweat it if things change up. It will be a happy accident. Not all my layouts turn out exactly the same, and that's okay.
After I have the chalk laid out, I go in at the pieces where I know there will be no second chances of realignment unless I start all over. I decided to start off with the words "Grateful Spoon Gelato," basically the center piece. Sometimes, I do start with the most difficult part first so that when I am close to being done, the hard part has past and I could just put together the rest quickly if I needed to. And yes, I use painters type to help keep the artwork straight and clean.
A lot of the times when people watch while I work I tend to get insecure, because then they start criticizing and asking, "why don't I do it this way or why don't I do it that way?" When really, any artist would feel the same as I, where I have a sense of how the final outcome will be before they even see it themselves... so shush, wait for it!! lol
Everything is permanent after the chalk so I try to be as careful as possible. There are times where I had to just start all over because of little mistakes like not having enough room for wording. Little could mean big because those little mistakes look pretty awful. =p This one was a little tight at the bottom but with the focus on the center piece, I let this one go.
After the permanent ink is dry I remove the painters type and use a rag to wipe off the excess chalk that is left over from the prepping...
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| Here are some details! |
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| Decided to just get a bold point Red at the Store before dropping off, the store didn't have it of course! |
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| In the parking lot at LGO, filling in the red color (medium point which took forever!) and sprayed a final gloss varnish coat. |
ta-Daa!
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