EVOLUTION OF A BAR SIGN

About a year ago I decided to make a Bar sign for my basement dive!  For those of you not familiar with it (bar) I call it McHooligan’s pub!  The name comes from a Cartoon Network show called Regular Show (probably my favorite cartoon ever behind Johnny Quest).  So I liked the name and decided to steal it!  Hope J.G. Quintel doesn’t sue me! 

Like I said I wanted to make a unique bar sign for McHooligan’s!  So I got some old pumpkin pine flooring and planed it down removing the paint and roughness!  I dug out some old poplar lumber I had lying around and ripped it in a table saw.  I got real creative one day and put it all together in the form of a sign!  That was the easy part!  Next I had to figure out what to put on the sign!  I knew it was going to say McHooligan’s on it somewhere but I wanted it to pop and look cool!  I needed an artist to do it!

I found a gorgeous roller derby girl and contacted her about doing it.  Along with being a bad ass roller derby vet and cute she also happened to be a kick ass artist!  Sadly our schedules never quite matched up and she wasn’t able to do the sign, but if she had I bet it woulda been gnarly!  Next I contacted a tattoo artist in Texas who had done some work in a comic I read!  He was pretty wishy washy like most tattoo artists and wouldn’t commit to the sign even though he showed interest through e-mail exchanges!  So I decided to do it myself!

I said “what the fuck” and decided to put my high school art experience to the test by coming up with my own unique design.  After several late night non porn related internet searches, various issues of Eric Powell’s Goon, and other whacky shit I read/watch I found a design that suited me!  Next I had to figure out how to bring it to life! 

I got an old comic book sketch pad and began doing various incarnations of the final design!  After a few weeks I settled on a final face design!  I had an old GI JOE Adventure Team font from a record jacket and it was the basis for the font I used for the lettering!  I fucked around and settled on the final font size.  Next it was time to transfer the font and images to the actual wood sign which I had stained! 

I had an old pad of carbon paper lying around to I used it to trace the letters and image onto the sign after I coated the sign with painters tape.  I then used a fine exacto knife to cut the letters out first!  I used a glossy spray paint for the yellow McHooligans and a glossy black for the PUB!  I then did the same carbon paper trace for the face which obviously was based on me!  For the skin ton I used an acrylic paint.  To outline the face and its details I used an acrylic paint marking pen!  I used the same type of pen to outline the letters!  The last step was putting 3 total coats of gym floor varnish on it to give it a nice finished look.  The first coat was a gloss coat finish followed by two coats of satin finish with light sanding in between coats! 

The mustache was a piece of pumpkin pine cut out with a jigsaw!  I drew one side and mirrored it to form the other side and hand traced it then cut it out!  The mustache is painted with an acrylic flat black spray paint and has 3 coats of gym floor varnish as well!  I should note that I was originally going to hand the mustache from the sign, but I didn’t like the way it was going to work so I decided to mount it to the wall below the bar sign!  I plan on getting everyone who worked on the bar with me to sign the mustache with a paint pen then add a last coat of finish to lock the signatures in place!

I was pretty damned pleased how this sign turned out to be honest!  If you know me, anything I build I take a lot of pride in (Ark).  And I was pretty unsure on how to do this sign and I was pretty sure I was going to fuck it up something fierce!  But in the en it turned out better than I had hoped!  Not bad for a guy who tool art class in junior high and high school and reads a few comic books and watches a few cartoons! 

Hopefully if you ever get the invite you can come buy McHooligans and see the sign in the flesh as well as the bar, the Ark and Chief Wooden head and all the other cool projects I have going on down there!  Just drop me a line and come have a beer if I don’t think you’re a douche of course!

Cheers!