Hand Letter a Wooden Sign

I’ve been waiting to do this post for about a month now, and I am so excited about it! I made this wooden sign for my niece’s baby shower, but I couldn’t show you how I did it till I gave it to her! The shower was Saturday and now I can share how you can do a hand-lettered wooden sign with nothing more than a little time, your computer, a white pencil, and some Sharpies and paint pens.

I started with a pre-made and pre-weathered 12 x 18 wooden sign I picked up in a crafts store.  The planks created natural “breaks” between words, which made measuring a little easier. To figure out the size of the letters, I measured one of the boards, went into Word and created a text box the size of the board. I typed each word of my saying into the text box and increased the font size until I filled the text box. I then removed the text box outline and printed it all out, as seen below.

You can see that each sheet of paper contains one word and each piece of paper ended up folded in half. The reason for that folding is that I folded each sheet of paper right under the word, placed the half sheet on the board above where I was writing and then basically drew the letters onto the boards with a white pencil (I knew some of the letters would be white and I wanted to be sure that I could see them on the boards while not having pencil marks show through if they didn’t erase well (which some of them didn’t)). Unfortunately, I didn’t take a picture of this, but I started with the basic shape of the letter and then made another white pencil mark to indicate the full width of each letter. Believe me, my real handwriting looks nothing like Times New Roman! This is probably the part that took the longest – I used a ruler to make sure each letter was set up in the right place on the board both width and height-wise.

Once I had outlines for each letter, I simply took my colored paint pens and Sharpies and filled in my outlines. I then tried to erase the white pencil marks – luckily, the blue paint  pens covered pretty well and the weathering on the boards was white, because when I tried to erase the pencil marks under the blue parts, the eraser started picking up blue paint! Mind you, I let it dry for a full day before I went at it, so I’m not sure why that happened, but once I noticed that, I simply erased the places where the white was extremely visible (cleaning the eraser between each erasure so I didn’t smear blue everywhere) and went over the blue letters again as needed.

It’s not “perfect” and believe me, I see every imperfection, but it’s cute and my niece (and all the other guests who saw it) just loved it! Looking at it as if I didn’t make it, the imperfections actually work with the weathering to give it a real folk art look, like it was something someone’s grandma made and it’s been sitting in the attic for 100 years.

Hope this has inspired you to try lettering on wood – it’s not nearly as hard as it seems and it was a lot of fun!