Difficulty Level : ♥ ♥ _ _ _
Do you have a certain style in your home that doesn't fit the gamer aesthetic? Sometimes when we get older our styles change, and we want a more sophisticated look to our spaces, but that doesn't change the fact that we are still gamers! I came up with the idea of imitating those popular home quotes signs, but making it fit the land of Hyrule. The great thing about this project is you can customize it with any quote you'd like.
Supplies:
Wooden Sign (new or thrifted)
Paint
Brushes
Quote of your choosing
Directions:
1. Prep your sign. If you picked one up from the thrift store give it a cleaning. You may also want to sand any pre-existing paint off.
With my sign I gave it 2 coats of gesso/primer, but that might not be needed depending on your sign
2. Create your quote. I went to photoshop to type out my quote and test out fonts. This is a great way to get an overall idea on how your sign will look. You can also choose to just freehand your lettering if you are confident in text. I am not, so I went the digital way first. After getting the look I wanted I printed it out to scale.
If you like the look of my sign, feel free to use my text.
As you can see my text came out a little too small my first time around, so I resized it to fit the sign better. This wasn't that much of an issue because I tested it on my primed sign instead of after I painted it.
3. Paint your sign. Now that we have a good size quote, its time to paint! if you did a test run you will be painting over that, so make sure you hold onto your paper. I chose to use artist acrylic paint for my base because it is a little thicker then regular crafters acrylic. Because I didn't sand my sign down you could still see a little of the previous wording, so the artist acrylic smoothed it all out. I used the color Unbleached Titanium for my base, Pennsylvania Clay for the sides, and a basic black for the sponged effect.
I only painted the top with the Unbleached Titanium color
Once the sides were painted with the Pennsylvania Clay color I used some of the leftover paint that was on my brush to drybrush some texture to the top of the sign
To give the sides some texture I used a piece of scrap cardboard package stuffing; a plastic bag will give you a similar look.
4. Transfer your text. The next two steps are the most challenging parts of the whole project. A way to make things a little easier is to cover the back of the paper where your text is with the graphite from a pencil. That will turn your printout into a transfer. After doing that you just simply have to go over the letters with pressure onto your sign. That will create a faint drawing of your text (as seen bellow). You can also buy graphite transfer paper from the craft store.
5. Paint your text. The brush you use will depend on the style font you chose. I decided to play this game on Hero mode so I chose the skinniest font in the land of Hyrule. Because of that decision I not only needed a very skinny brush, I had to go very slowly when painting. If you decided to do a font similar to mine, you might want to get a paint brush marker instead of using paint from a bottle like I did.
I also do not recommend the Craftsmart black paint, it is more like a grey color then black. I was very unhappy with the "black" color so I went over it with an enamel black paint I had. Enamel is a thicker type paint so I thought it was going to be much more challenging to do the exaggerated script font, but it actually glided over the existing paint very easily.
This is the sign completed with the thicker black font.
Thank you for viewing this tutorial. I hope it was helpful.
If you create your own Home Quote sign please tag HylianHomemaker on instagram and use the hastags #zeldiy & #hylainhomemaker .
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