Now, I'm no artist by any means, but I do have a vinyl cutter so I thought I could create a stencil, then use spray paint for the color, and finally distress it to my liking.
I think I'm going to make my sign about 30" high and about 25" wide and will probably make it out of 16 gauge steel, but before I cut out the shape of the sign, I wanted to make sure that my plan would work. I've had issues with using vinyl as stencils before and I've never distressed a sign either so I wanted to do a test run on a much smaller scale.
I found a piece of scrap steel I had. This one is 1/8" thick and about 11" square.
I cleaned it up with a wire wheel grinder then sprayed a coat of primer first, then flat white on top of that.
I wasn't exactly sure of what I wanted the dealer info to say, so I drew up a few different designs.
I picked one, then I cut out the vinyl and weeded it. I used orange vinyl because "orange man bad" right?
Next, I applied the transfer paper. This is only to help apply it and gets thrown away like all my hopes and dreams.
I peeled off the transfer paper and used Rustoleum 2X satin spray paint for the red, blue and black. In this picture, the paints are all dry but you can see all those black specs in the white are where the vinyl peeled up some of the white exposing the steel below. I waited almost 24 hours to apply the vinyl over the white, but it's possible I didn't wait long enough. I also didn't wait long enough to start peeling off the vinyl on the blue paint at the bottom. According to my wife, I have a problem with finishing things too soon...
Finally I used a green scotchbrite pad to remove some of the gloss and distress the paint.
