I had a little project to do over this break for a family friend and I learned a lot while doing it. I had to create a sign that they gave to me that had someone else’s last name on it, which meant I had to cover the other name first before I put their name on it. Well, in my head, I had everything planned out what I wanted to do. They gave me a reference picture too, so I was also going by that. I drew it up in Illustrator to show them what it would look like and they loved it.

To start, I knew I wanted to use spray paint because it would be less time consuming and in my opinion easier, even though I didn’t know much about spray paint. My first mistake was I should have looked more into spray paint and its limitations. But I learned a lot from using it as it was a new type of medium for me. My cover photo above is an image of what the letters looked like after I took the sticker paper off. Not good!

Next, I created my own stencil to use. First I had it printed it out on paper and tried to use it as a paper stencil. Once again that did not work out because it wasn’t adhering to the piece of wood as closely as I wanted it. Then I remembered I had this sticker paper so in my head I said, well this is perfect! It will stick to the board and the letters will come out clear. I was wrong again. I didn’t take into consideration that the spray paint would bleed through the sticker paper. In the end I had all these extra paint spots on the letters.

So what did I do? I started again from scratch. I took my spray paint primer and covered the entire piece of wood. Then I asked my Dad for advise and he said to use a piece of cardboard because it will be sturdier and won’t bleed through. So that is what I ended up doing and it did come out a lot better.

I’m starting to learn that art is all about taking risks in a way and making mistakes so that you can learn from them the next time you choose to do another similar project. I did learn a lot from this one, which is good!