Design Your Own Vintage Style Sign

by ScavengerChic

I love vintage signs and apparently everyone else does too. The cost of a genuine old sign is somewhere in the hundreds of dollar range.
Did you know that you can make your own sign practically for free. Yup, free! I’m assuming you have some acrylic paints or latex paint just laying around your house and you have access to some pallet wood and a printer. Ok, it might not be totally free, but it’s pretty darn close.

design your own vintage style sign, crafts, pallet, repurposing upcycling

What I like about homemade signs is that you can choose absolutely any image you like. You don’t have to settle for an old Shell gas station sign that’s practically rusted out.

Go online and search “Vintage Signs” and once you narrow your scope down, like “crabs”, decide what style you like. Do you like a realistic picture, a cartoon image, just the outline? Do you like the old style, lettering with a shadow or just block lettering?

Once you decide on what kind of sign you’d like to make, start designing. My program of choice is Microsoft Publisher, but I’m sure there are others with just as many options.

Publisher allows me to create absolutely any size image I like. This sign is going to be 30 inches by 36 inches. The size is totally up to you.

Decide on your graphic. This crab graphic was chosen from within Publisher with the provided Clipart. For vintage pics, you can’t beat The Graphics Fairy or Vintage Printable or just click on google images for 1000s of pictures.

With whatever image you choose, make sure it takes up a good portion of the sign.

Add your lettering, graphics and borders. You may want to use genuine vintage style signs as your inspiration. Be creative...this is a great time to fool around with colors, image sizes and fonts.

Make your sign the same dimensions of the sign you just created on your computer.

This sign is created with strips of pallet wood, nailed together with slats on the back. If your pallet wood is rough, take a palm sander to it until it is smooth enough to paint on. It does not have to be perfect. My pallets had a fairly smooth side and a really rough side, I chose the fairly smooth side for the front of the sign.

Transfer the image you created on the computer to the sign and start painting.

Finish off with a light sanding and wax. Voila, instant vintage sign.

Need more inspiration and more transferring and painting techniques... make sure you stop on by!

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3 of 4 comments

Sharon on Sep 01, 2015
How do you transfer the image to the sign?? (not a crafty person)

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- ScavengerChic on Sep 01, 2015
  @Sharon I know this isn't a good answer, but make sure you click on the link to my website, there were too many photos to bring over. If you still have questions just let me know.
  
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ScavengerChic on Sep 01, 2015
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