I have been doing some fun work at Minuteman Volkswagen, a VW dealership in Bedford, MA. My first assignment was to letter out the name "Minuteman" on one wall and create the VW emblem on another.
I had a sign shop cut a one time use, adhesive backed vinyl stencil, for both of these elements. All seemed fine.
Here is the "before" shot of the first wall I tackled. It’s painted a light grey. The painting was done by an outside contractor.
The sign was about 13" long, spanning over the top of 2 cubicles in the office area. I put it up in four sections. Here you see the letters filled in with blue paint. Once dry, I began to remove the vinyl stencil.
If you look closely, you can see where the basecoat started to pull away from the wall. Anyone who does this type of work, is surely feeling my pain about now. I kept pulling off the vinyl stencil, very slowly, in small sections. Most of it was fine, but there were 4 large areas that were not so fine. I was able to get a lot of the paint to lay back down on the wall, with out tearing or rippling, by patting it with a damp cloth. In other areas, I was not so lucky and the paint pulled right off, down to the wall board.
After I pulled all the vinyl off, I let the wall sit over night, then came back with some Ready Patch. I made a thin paste of the patch, mixing it with some water and applied to all the damaged areas. I did 2 coats, let dry, primed, and base coated gray again. Since these letters were so big, I was able to just tape them out with blue tape.
This was one of the worst areas that needed patching.
And this was another bad area! Of course, I was right out in full view of everyone, while this was happening!
In the end, it all came out fine. 🙂
But… now I had a 5′ circular VW logo to paint on another wall. I already had the same type of adhesive backed vinyl stencil cut and ready to go. No way was I going to stick this giant stencil to another one of these walls! Instead, I kept the backing on the vinyl and cut it out as a regular stencil. I used tape and spray adhesive to adhere it to the wall!
Here is the wall the logo was going on, directly behind the glass wall.
This was just really fun to do! Without the worry of the adhesive vinyl pulling up the paint, I didn’t even mind working out in the open with everyone walking by, checking on the progress. The logo is about 5′ in diameter.
Now I am working on some sketches for a mural, which I will then do on canvas in my studio and mount onto a wall above a doorway that leads to a waiting room. Stay tuned…
