My first attempt at a large, multi-part sign! I’m not entirely happy with it, but you have to start somewhere. My customer seems happy, so all good.
Gimp for Graphics->Illustrator for Vectors->Easel. 2 coats of poly around the stained sections, so I could wipe clean as I applied the color. The horse graphic was provided, I did the rest. Took a surprisingly long time to plan, design and execute, whew!
Thanks! Trying to work towards a small time sign business; I did this one, and I’m currently doing another (thankfully smaller, but 2-sided) sign for business owners that are family friends, just charging them for materials, to get started. They agreed to help get my name out there.
The sign is in 6 pieces; it’s the first time I’ve tried to do something like that. I think an improvement would be to properly join the pieces, to get to “as close to seamless” as possible. The vertical came out fairly good, but there’s a little bit of a gap in the horizontal fit.
On the other hand, this was for a horse barn, and the flaws really just come across as “Rustic”, so it’s okay for this project.
The complete sign design (most of it, anyway) was in an image file. I used a function in Gimp called “guillotine” to get the individual slices that I needed, and imported each one into Illustrator, where I generated vectors. (SVG files) I just took care to scale everything consistently, as I worked on things in the software, and in Easel, and it all lined up. I’m paranoid, of course, so I’d wind up doing a bunch of checks before actually cutting each board, lol.
do some search for Joinery for woodworking. They have techniques for doing joins that are virtually seamless.
I do not have enough experience at it to guide you and there are plenty of Youtube tuts.
No, as stated, that’s something that I need to increase my knowledge about. There are flats screwed in from the back to even up the boards to each other.