Project of the Day : Giant Partagas Sign

[shilala]

I'm just winding up my most recent Partagas sign.
It's huge. Around 42" X 21" X 1 3/4".
It's made out of solid cherry, supported in back so it won't cup, plus I stained and polyurethaned the back so it's super pretty.
I'm weird about that stuff. I know nobody will ever see the back of things. They won't see the underside. They won't even care. But I do. And the guy who hangs this on his wall, he will. It's that little extra that makes something go from craft to craftsmanship.

She's got so many coats of latex enamel on it that I couldn't even place a number on it. It's part of the painting process. I paint everything one color, then repaint it. Then if there's touch-up, I repaint it again.
Then I start painting the letters and border. I make an unholy mess. As I fix the messses, I put another coat and another coat on.
What that does is provide an uneven, built up surface that gives it some character. Sort of like it's been repainted a gazillion times over the last 100 years or so.

At the very end, I throw five or six coats of polyurethane on it. In the end, it'll be satin, but on the way up I use gloss. High gloss poly is ideal for building, satin is not. Satin tends to migrate and pool while gloss lays out. It goes to the surface tension of the two blends, and it's a cool trick that's really helped me to make nice poly finishes.
The poly over the latex will hold down the latex stickies. Latex is sometimes goofy and it likes to dry, get sticky, dry, get sticky, and never stop the cycle. The poly stops that nonsense and keeps the dust from sticking to the sign.

I've made 5 of these signs in the past, all smaller ones. The whole point was to work up to this one. I tried lots of different techniques on the way to this sign to get what I wanted, and I'm very pleased. I'm excited about reproducing some other old signs in the future, and maybe some not-so-old stuff. All in the cc realm, because I love that classic art.

Anyways, a couple pics as I finish out.
Here are a couple from the spinning finish table. That's my new and awesome lazy susan thing I built for painting and finishing. It helps me spin things as I work and really saves a lot of struggling while I paint.
I'll post pics of the back and a pic that relays the size after the poly dries.