signs

As I said in this post I love kitchen signs, particularly the ones that look handpainted and a little Victorian. I really wanted a sign on the side of the bookcase where I’ve put the French baguette bin, but as it was a fixed position I had two options.

The first was to do a seperate sign and the fix it to the wall. This would have given me the opportunity to take my time in painting the letters.

The second was to apply something to the wall itself. I’ve never got to grips with image transfers, but as I’ve recently found water slide decals this seemed like the best option (see here and here). It meant that I could choose something with a lot of detail too, which is a bonus.

By the way I used an iPad and Canva app to do this, so the instructions obviously reflect that, however I’m sure you can adapt them for other systems.

The first thing was to design a sign. I’d done a lot of inspiration research and I really like a mixture of typefaces and scrolls etc. I also like illuminated letters. I trawled through Pinterest for free to download Wreath illustrations (thank you graphics fairy) and monogram letters to use.

Take a screen shot

When you come across an image or piece of typography you like you can take a screen shot of it – all computers have different ways of doing this, so you may have to look yours up. However on an iPad, as I tend to us, it means pressing the circular home button and your on/off button to the side of the iPad at the same time. When you do that a photo of the image you want will be taken and stored in your photos.

Edit the screen shot

Your screen shot will have lots of other things apart from the image you want on it, so you need to get rid of the excess. On your iPad when you have your photo open in images you’ll see an icon for editing it in the top, left hand corner; press on that.

The edit facility will look like this

The third icon down, the square with arrows surrounding it in shot 2, is the option you chose to edit the image. Once you’ve clicked on it the image will be smaller and you’ll have two capacities on your iPad; to rotate the image to a position you want it in using the dial on the right, or to resize it using the four corners at the edge of the image. Just move the highlighted corner to move the edges inward until the image is cropped. When you’re done press ‘done’ on the right hand side and your image stays like that. However if you want it to go back to the original go back through the edit system and press revert.

Creating your layout

Once you’ve selected typefaces and decorative details for your sign you want to create a layout. I used the Canva app to do mine, which is a free app that you can download. At the top of the open app you’ll see lots of different options – I chose poster for this project.

You can use a pre-existing template, but I just wanted a blank space to try different set ups on. In the left hand tool bar (see above) you can see an option saying uploads. If you click on it an icon for your photos comes up and clicking on this shows you your photo gallery including your cropped images.

Select your image and slide it into the work space. Above the image you’ll see lost of different functions. Move the image to where you want it and make it smaller by touching on one of the black circles moving them in (below).

As I wanted a monogram effect I’d already decided I wanted a stand alone type face in our surname, so I had the image stored in the gallery and added that in the same way. I used the same method to move and make smaller the image. As you can see in the image below, images added from your gallery will have a solid background, so if they overlap another image from your gallery they will block out that part of the image. Canva text boxes don’t have this problem though.

You can see in the next shot that I just position the V in a way that ensures no overlap.

In the next one you can see I’ve applied a text box using the text icon. There are lots of pre-existing layouts you can use, but I find that some are stuck in caps so it’s easier to use the simple ‘add text’.

In the next image down you can’t see a tool bar has come up above the keyboard. It does that when you touch the text to alter it. On the left hand side you can see the typeface which you can scroll through to get your preferred one. Once you see the one you like touch it and you’re text changes. Use the large and small capital to increase or decrease the size of the text and then position the text where you want it to go.

Carry on in this way until you have the design you want. You can see in my final design below how the text of ‘akery’ overlaps the B typeface that I’d downloaded. This is because the text box, unlike the downloaded images, doesn’t have a solid background so they give far more flexibility.

The image below is towards the end of my final design. If you look at the ‘Pastries’ text you will see there is a turning arrow symbol. I used this to give the pastries word a slant that mirrored the scroll design. You can also see the scroll design below has a part of the image I couldn’t crop out, but as I’m going to apply them with water slide decals this doesn’t matter as I can crop them in real life with scissors.

At this stage it’s best to download your image by pressing the download function button on the top right hand side of the screen and a box appears for you to download (See below). I always use the top option and it saves the image into my photos. I then insert the image into a document page and make sure it’s at full size.

The next thing to do is seperate all the parts of the image so that you can remake them on a bigger scale. I did this by using the additional page function, then copying an element of the design and putting it on an individual page.

If you see the images below you can see I’ve copied the image by pressing on the two, overlaying rectangles in the right hand margin. To get lots of seperate images delete all but the part that you want to use in a stand alone capacity. So the wreath and family name I’ve kept as one image on a page, the bread and cakes part another and so on. Some I didn’t make a page for, like the B, as I already had a cropped image of this to make this mock up.

Take a screen shot of these stand alone parts (see below) and crop them as before (below again).

In your pages section, using the mock up as a template, seperate out the parts so that you’ll be able to print them on waterslide decal paper.

In order to determine how best to lay your design out you need to think about how many pages your design will need to be spread over. I did this by holding a piece of A4 paper in landscape and then counting how many I would need to fill the space in the top portion and the bottom. The design was spread over this many pages.

Do a mock up first; printing on plain paper and placing them where you think they should go. This way you won’t waste any decal paper.

Also, once you have an idea of the text size you’ll need, you may want to rearrange your components of text into different groupings in order not to waste too much waterslide paper.

You’ll notice that the finished piece has some additional illustrations. When I put them on the side of the cupboard I wasn’t satisfied with the gap at the top between bakery and our family name in the wreath and bakery, so I hunted around for a suitable illustration and followed the steps again.

I’d also started placing the bottom part too near the base and there was an unsatisfactory gap. The illustration of the woman drinking her tea was perfect to fill it. As far as I’m aware all these are free to use by the way.

Finally, I’d planned to fill the original bakery B with my own colours, but as I sealed the design with a coat of spray varnish they ran. I’d use different sharpies and expected that to work, but alas no. So the B you see in the image was my second attempt.

Also, as you can see, I’ve changed the baguette bin from lavender to a teal blue. I think it’s a better tone for the yellow, don’t you?

What do you think? The kitchen is no where near finished and I might be a bit crazy to have done it already, but I’m super pleased with the result. Even the hubby likes it!

If you have any questions drop me a line!