Finishing up for the Year End 2004

The Church Sign went up easy and the few I have seen are very pleased.
I will have to wait for eleven degrees celcius to paint the exsisting posts and a couple of finishing touches.

I would like to mention, that summer 2003, after having been asked by several people to stop in, I did, and for a non-practicing christian, I really enjoyed and felt very uplifted by the whole experience. Lots of Joyous Singing, very nice tunes, totally non-pretentious surroundings but comfortable and ordinary folk wearing great big smiles; I may not know the lord personally, but I saw a whole bunch of people I knew knew ! Time flew and it was over.
That is the Alliston Christian Fellowship. Great Philanthropists in our Town, too.


The School Signs: ready to install when it's above -20c (for my fingers sake)

The plastic signs, I ended up having plenty for Christmas, and some to start of the count in January. This is an ongoing project, I make to order, 12 at a time. I hope to making a couple of dozen a week for a couple of months. Then it may get bigger !

The cottage sign Impressed the whole family, indeed I did very nice carving of the script if I do sayso myself. And this was one of my favourite creations of the year. Actually I make all my signs with passion for my craft and definitely have my own Style of design.

The bulletin board project - revisions are with the client.

I did not yet get my pictures on this site. I have tried several times to ski the learning curve of web publishing and although slightly frustrated at this Hello and piscasa programs, I am enjoying learning all sorts of tech-end. I absolutely could not yet Design someone's webpage; I tip my hats to them. Especially the old guysers like me whom find it extra challenging.

The second month of blogs goes into archives tonight, and the articles are all over the place, I know. The format is not what I want for what this site has become.
But for the meantime, I hope Some people have found some things Interesting. I know there are some people are checking it out, that's a sign of some worth. But creating this site has been very worthwhile to me and if no one else is even reading this now, I feel this pleasure from typing it anyway; getting comments from you would be a bonus.

My personal favourite posts areThe Evolution of the sign,Dec 1st & a miscellany day, Nov 24th.

Thank you Blogger people and google for providing a great public service for free.
Thank you Bloggers everywhere !
Thank you readers
Thank you friends
Thank you Neighbours.

Tomorrow may come, and for thousands it wont. But The disaster in Indiasia should be a SIGN to us all to end each day being sure that we have done our best with life.
Life shows us lots of signs pointing us in the right direction in life, If only we Follow the Signs.
Cliff Perry, the Signs Guy

My History in the Sign Business - Conclusion

begins with Signs 1.01
1.02
1.03
1.04
then . . .
In 1995, I returned to Canada and with a wealth of experience few others could match, I sought to join larger companies where I would work with teams to create larger, expensive architectural landmarks; signage that can’t really be done by a one man band. The Computer really had pushed hand-done work out of practicality, profitability, and took much of the satisfaction out of it too. By 1999 there were only two things left that the computer couldn’t do that I could. - lettering directly onto concrete - they now have vinyl that adheres to concrete ; and, reproducing antique style signs, and now these folk art signs that are done in Asia and sell at nearly dollar store prices - well I can’t do them that cheap, but I really really truly doubt that the computer will ever be able to beat those ”artists” either. But I’ve underestimated the computer before.

So now, 24 years later, I come full circle and in seeking renewed satisfaction for my craft, I again become a one-man band, in my beautiful town of Alliston, Ontario and begin a new era in my career where I will combine the best of my creativity , brush, airbrush, computer, and vast experience and try to make a living but with fulfillment.



My life masterpiece -
Most would not know the meticulous detailing. The sweat and tears to create it, then the client changes his mind 1 hour before I finish. And he still wants it on time. Exhastburating. Challenging. Moments of fun. Hours of focussed, fulfilling effort, some tedium, keep your wits about you as you go through the 11th hour, watch the fresh paint, watch the apprentice inadvertently scratch it or put it on upside down,, Now the client wants two. Aluminum dust, paint fumes. Vinyl fumes. Compressor noise. Dust in the air. plastic dust. Distractions. Do this first - it’s a rush. Wait, this is rush too. But do this other other rush first. ……………

It’s said there’s three kinds of signs and you can only pick two at a time -
Good and cheap, but not fast
Good and fast but not cheap
Fast and cheap, but not good
But of course everyone wants it all.
And when it’s complete, they want it blue, not green; you made two, they want three,
You install three. They really only need one and don’t want to pay for the others.
UGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH !!!!!!!!!!1

But we love this business despite it all.


I pause for a moment as I pallet my brush in my cup,
Some emerald green on my dry and wrinkled thumb
I gaze past the paint and the quill that my dad once owned,
and see his hands.
END

Why my father in law was glad he was married

Len was a cockney - and a sign installer from inner London with a thick colloquial accent and speaking the cockney rhyming slang that I needed a translater for most of his talking. It was the first Christmas I'd met him and the family get together was going well. He had had a few drinks and proceded to tell one of his many tales. . . . .

" When I'd married a few years, I's sent out to change tubes ( the burnt out neon 8' light bulbs ) on the lights of Piccadilly ( Circus ) . Were a hundred or so needed changing and course there's a couple right 'the very top of the fourth floor. Me mates and me got several ladders lined up on the pavement and had to use our belts to hold them together to make them long enough to reach top. With thousands of people milling about was not easy. We also had a bit of the old snow which we don't get often, but it was there, slushy and all from the people walking through it. Then we had to upright the ladders which being 60 foot tall was also not easy. So we get up the ladder and it bending and swaying like a banana, passed tubes up with our left hand, down with our right. As I get to top, the bottom of the ladder slips a bit and it wants to go down sideways and as me mates below try to scramble down, my wedding ring gets caught on a bit of steel at the top and with my feet hooked around the step, I am able to hold us all three from the ladder going down. Matey gets to the bottom and adjusts the leg and I am able to unhook my ring finger and finish the job. It was that ring what saved us. That was worth getting married for."

finishing a batch of different sign types

Yesterday I changed my mind on the leafing and went to Aluminum Leaf rather than copper. ( I had full artistic licence on this sign ). I feared that the copper would not last more than a few years even coated, and this being for a cottage is not a sign I can go check up on anytime. I have done it once before and recall it looked best a year later but looked very old by it's third year. I ended up replacing it with gold.
So it's looking fantastic this morning and so today it's add the brass eyebolts, check every detail and then a clear coat; end of the day I'll mount the two carvings on the blank, take a photo or two and print an invoice. for tomorrows delivery.

The school signs have their yellow curvy border and edges. Today it's the backs painted and the front centre area painted vivid blue. Tomorrow it's add vinyl lettering and install, photo, invoice.

The church sign is ready for the vinyl lettering this morning, then I'll assemble it and install it tomorrow as well.

The pedestal sign has been postponed till the spring. She has changed her mind about the slate, and the information she wants on it. She'll call me back in January.

Next is the Billboard which I will now finish final submission for client.

The plastic signs for assembly will wait till next week, they aren't needed for a while anyway.

the next stages in my projects

Today its' leafing the incised script on the cottage sign. I will shortly brush the letters with a sizing and wait a couple of hours before applying a copper leaf to the letters. In the meantime I will colour the fish and the chair.

Church sign - first coat of colour on every surface. brown on the background, cream on the panels.

School signs likewise first coat of colour - on the borders. First I will cover the centre of the board with 12' wide masking tape and then cut out the shape of the irregular border, remove the excess tape and paint the border. 2nd coat 12 hours from then.

an hour designing the pedestal sign.

assemble 10 plastic signs.

spend another hour trying to get photos onto this site.

Day in the life of a Lone Sign maker

Christmas is the deadline for most of the projects I have on right now And since I can't get my brainspace into editing or writing for the day, I shall describe what I'm doing and how and why.

3 More signs for the School adding to the main signs I did in the summer: 3 shaped ( i dislike rectangles) crezon signs , yesterday was the prime coat and I do this with a stiff brush to make sure I get into every little pore on every surface. Today I'll sand them lightly and put on the base white coat; on the back this hour, on the front and edges this evening.

A cottage sign ( client is giving it as a christmas present ) : 12" x 40" x 2" . I've already spent 3 hours carving a 16" tall fish (pike) and a 12" tall wooden deck chair which are to be attached to either end of the sign. Last night I finished incising the name in a script. Today it's staining the blank, and painting the coloured details on the fish and shadowing the chairs. tomorrow is leafing and shmaltzing.

Post and Panel Church Welcome: 4' x 4' crezon panel with raised header and footer panels
and an Open Book in the middle with a changable message. today its base coating.

I have assembly of 30 plastic signs on the go.

Design for stage two of a Car Dealership. One was the showroom rendering of the new building 2'x3'. Two is fine tuning the details for the artwork of the site billboard 8' x 12' - january / february

Design for a pedestal coloum sign approx 2'w x 5' h x 1 1/2', just had meeting #2 with client; this is to be spectacular so we may run several weeks in the design alone. Wanted for the new year. Will be working with Slate, copper, stainless and wood.

A wood framed old style Chalkboard for a Pub that I've done all the other signage already
(not due yet - new year)

An Estate sign for the driveway entrance. Another really special one, still waiting on a desicion on which design.

And that's about all which is quite a bit for me, on top of being a single parent, which is a handfull in itself.

I will try to get some photos here, but I'm still haven't figured out how. Error messages etc. ug.

Signs Story 1:04

My journey continued through parts of Europe and I ended up in Kent, England. My first week on the coast, I tried to cheer my partner up by scratching the word SMILE in the sandy beach in huge, huge letters visible from the cliff tops. My sign didn’t work. We split up. But a gent walking along the seafront approached me . “ Did you do those letters?” “Yes I did.” “ Could you do them in Paint ?” “Of course, I am a Sign Writer.”
He drove me out to the local airfield and got me to paint 6 - 30 foot tall letters atop of 6 -giant petrol tanks. That was the beginning of eight years of sign writing in England.

My next stint was carving and colouring wooden models on Antique reproduction signs - like the ones you can now buy for 49 bucks for your den. I got 40 quid each and I was told they went to America to retail for 350 dollars. I then travelled town to town, each train stop from Margate to London looking for a place to call home. I freelanced as I went in historic places like Sandwich, Herne Bay, Faversham, Canterbury, Royal Tunbridge Wells, gathering adventures, experience, new friends and many tales along the way. I found my new home in Uxbridge (west London) and a mid sized company to join, that along with traditional hand-painted signs was one of the first in England to have a sign making computer. They saw the best of the old ways and the new.

As I gained mastery of the computer, I likewise gained mastery of the airbrush, something I thought then a computer could never do. But it wasn’t too long before digital colour printing evolved. But before it became cheap, I hand painted and airbrushed over 200 traditional English pictorial pub signs in south-east England over the next 6 years. As well, I was one of the first to professionally use coloured chalks in elaborate indoor display messages on the many chalkboards found in every one of those pubs.

continued: SIGNS STORY 1.03

continued from Nov. 20th: The industrial revolution, and the proliferation of signs - the mass production of signs.

The last purpose of the sign was developed - To Promote Massive Sales. The machines of merchandising and advertising required the endless churning out of signs.
Nowadays, a donut shop might have 50 signs, a convenience store 500, a chain store 5000 to the point where they might even have there own sign making department to churn out a thousand or two each shopping season or each month. Or even each week.

Buy one - get one free, two for the price of one, Three for the price of one, 50% off, 60% off, Up to 80% off ! ( if you buy the complete set) ( no rain checks or coupons.)

For sale, yard sale, white sale, garage sale, closing out sale, all sales final. Biggest sale ever!


I want to tell you about my Dad.
He told me not to be a signwriter because I’d never make more than a living. But if I did learn the skills, at least I’d never be out of work. He said robots like the one on “Lost In Space“ would never be able to make a sign. I had been around his sign painting all my life - I was filling in his outlined letters when I was five. - I picked it up.
He had started in the maintenance department at AV Roe and it was asked if anyone had any talent painting with a brush. With his interest in art, my dad stepped forward and was asked to letter the dials and buttons in the cockpit of the prototype ARROW, the famous Canadian Avro Arrow supersonic jet plane of the 50's. He became a signwriter that day and continued on for 33 more years. He also hand painted the sign that went on top of the crane that built the CN Tower which while under construction was arguably the highest sign in the world.

I’d been out of school about four years and working at Harbourfront and in a similar way I became a signwriter. Within a few months, I set up shop on my own. As my skills and creativity improved, came to a time where I mastered the brush and the creation of Nice Looking Signs. In that era of mine in ‘79, I went to my first convention and discovered my nemesis, the New Sign Making, Vinyl-Cutting Computer. It’s like an upside down automatic ETCH-A-SKETCH except it’s got a sharp point instead of a stylus, and it cuts mac-tac instead of drawing on a screen. I tested it & tried to beat it. But it wasn’t just a little easier to make signs. It exploded on the market knocking me and many others in the trade out of competition. It was cheaper for me to buy cut vinyl letters from another sign shop than it was for me to paint them. I was hurt. My business went bust. The opportunity came for me to leave the country and so taking up my lost teenage dream of travelling the world, I left, with my lavishly decorated paint box, for an indefinite time, to travel.
My first stop was Iceland and I thought an omen had taken me there ! I wandered the streets of Reykjavik - I‘d expected it to be barren of trees, not signs ! If I‘d arrived on my own, I would have attempted to set up business before I’d unpacked my suitcase! But, my travelling companion, a native, halted my knee-jerk reaction and my thought processes in one foul swoop. “Cliff, Icelanders don’t need signs and they don’t want them”.
How Incredulously Foreign this thought was to Me !

Fish Mongers had Fish hanging in the windows. Book stores had books on display. I didn’t have to look 10 feet up to see that there was a clothing shop. There were some names on buildings and streets. But what stood out as the dominating form of communication as I recall was SYMBOLS - another word in the dictionary defining Signs. But not like I had known them until then. That was ‘86.
to be continued.

Is that why I haven't heard from any of my old sign buddies lately ?

Well – upon a bit of exploring the web prompted by a local sign gal, How To Buy Signs as a topic is covered rather well by a few different places. GEE ! I suppose being a sign guy, I didn’t feel any reason to see what’s already on the web – There is quite a bit, much of it well written and complete. And some information is repeated in various places.

But nowhere did I see a lot of the things about the biz that I’ve put down here.
So henceforth, I shall change this Blogspot name from How to buy signs.
“ Follow the Signs “ was the title of what was my 13 minute radio audio collage / documentary that was on CBC radio one at the beginning of the summer. My producer, The Honourable Steve Wadhams pulled it from the pages and hours of STUFF we had while piecing together my show. His blurb on the archives at cbc.ca/outfront says :
“Cliff Perry of Alliston, Ontario knows how to read signs and he knows how to make them. He's a traditional sign artist who's made the transition to the computer era with most of his passion for the trade still intact. He's also found that when life throws him a curve, a sign is always there to help get him back on track.”

So henceforth, I shall continue with my writing, Because I want to, Because I have a lot of stories that when told have in the past, have piqued the interest in people who’ve had the interest to listen, or indeed those who’ve had to work with me and couldn’t get away from my story telling of my past lives.
I have the contents of a book here in this manic – head; I also have the energy, Passion and the will to carve a book out of me. And I think that this BLOG has given me the impetus to Write Every day. Which I have thoroughly enjoyed !
No more pretentious know-it-all-and-you-won’t-read-it-anywhere-else shite.
Just interesting stories and Information on my biz; the Sign Biz !

See you tomorrow.

The evolution of the signs business.

6000 BC: My great great . . . grandfather, who wasn’t a great fisherman became the local Cave painter and draws an arrow on a rock to point to good hunting grounds.
3000 BC: Sumeria, Egypt, Inca, got creative at headstone incising. Paints last long time as long as you don’t put them out in the sun.
1000 BC: First Pub in England got a pictograph ( no one could read yet) “The Cave Inn”

1400 AD: Signpainters begin their own guild, brushes rediscovered & developed, pounce patterns.
1600s: Decals on gelatin transfer sheets
1850 : Industrial Revolution. Sign Painters really busy. More people can read Them.
1900 : Screen Printing – mass production of signs can happen.
1920s: NEON
1950s: the airbrush; pressure sensitive Vinyl – Mac tac
1960s: further development of Vinyls and reflective markers
1974: My dad paints the sign that goes on top of the CN Tower’s crane. Highest sign in the world.
1979: the Gerber Vinyl cutting plotter – Cuts letters out in minutes. The beginning of the end of Traditional sign painting.
1983: the 8 colour automated airbrush that scales large outdoor walls to do murals;
CNC sheet material letter cutters
1990s: Digital Thermal Printing for mid term outdoor use; Fast vinyl cutters, computer interfaced
2004: Digital printing directly on to sheet material. The beginning of the end of weeding vinyl !
2010: All signs will be made in China for next to nothing and shipped UPS in three days.
2020: What do you mean sign – ‘Painter’ ?
2060: signs become obsolete. Personal gps – direction devices implanted in brain – We will have all information broadcast directly into our skulls.

So Why does anybody still chose to make signs by hand ?
Butt gets sore from sitting in front of a machine.
Huge overhead costs in these modern machines.
Some times, it’s nice to have that traditional Touch.
Satisfaction level for the sign painter high.
Signpainting still 10,000 times more environmentally friendlier.
And there are still, if few, circumstances that a computer cannot do.