The lost art of signwriting

or Close enough is not good enough...

Berri is on the slip at Castlecrag being antifouled and generally scrubbed up for her next biggish gig. Click the link on the homepage for her AIS position. More on that later.

About 20 years ago, I had a professional signwriter paint her name on each side of the bow. He made a sort of graphite template on paper (DSC1697, below) which he used to mark the surface and then used a soft brush and a signwriter's rod with a cloth ball on one end as a wrist rest and off he went. Not a bad job either. I've kept the template ever since.

The name had become very faded and hard to read so a  few days ago, I asked someone who called himself a signwriter - at least on the side of his van - if he'd repeat the process for me and I offered him the template. "Nah!" he said, "Not interested - we just stick on plastic letters these days". Oh Poo!

So, today, when I'd finished covering myself with blue antifouling, I had some time to spare and thought it might be worth trying to repaint the name. A doubtful proposition and here's the result. Looks ok from about 3 metres away but zoom in and you can see just how rough it really is. I used a flat brush, about 6mm, and freehand over the old paint, with my opposite forearm as a rest for the brush hand. With my senile tremor and reading glasses, it's wobbly and all over the place. Very hard to correct wobbles and flicks because it just makes more mess. About 2 hours of intense concentration and effective as long as you keep your distance...

But a journey of a thousand miles...

Test 1