Be Circle: Freelance Drupal expertise. Playing full contact Drupal in Toronto.

Painting Lettering on Your Drupalicon Munny

Adding lettering for me was a multi-part process. Creating a stencil, painting on the lettering through the stencil with the air brush, and finally hand painting to fill the stencil gaps and to make the paint a little more solid.

First I resized the Drupal wordmark in photoshop to be about 6.5cm in width.

I then printed it out and started to create a stencil. I couldn't use masking tape for the stencil because it would be too flimsy. Instead I used some acetate like film that I had lying around. Its rigid enough to create a stencil, but nearly flexible enough to conform to the contours of the Munny body shape.

After creating the stencil I did some tests with the airbrush. Since the stencil doesn't have an adhesive back it is not a perfect mask and could easily bleed the paint if care wasn't taken. (as you can see in the one image on the left). The trick is to use a very light mist of paint and do several passes slowly building up the colour.

I didn't want to attempt to use the stencil to completely fill the lettering on the body with colour, I simply wanted a way to transfer the shapes of the letter to the body.

Once the basic letter shapes were on the body I used a fine brush and carefully painted in the letters with several thin coats of paint until I was satisfied with the opacity.

The only trick to getting this right is a steady hand and patience.