New Bohemia Signs

We gilded "TOSCA", in the Broadway style of "CAFE", last week, on a replacement for a broken pane in their door. Always a pleasure to help old SF institutions retain their charm! We also patches a few dings on the CAFE side.

Mmm, purdy new sign makes me wanna check this place out! #nbsignsoriginaldesigns

Walk-by survey of the directionally burnished faux facets on the Willow on the Green.

Dave had the bed of his truck re-painted, and dropped by to have his phone number gilded and painted in again. It's always super nice to spot this beautiful Ford out in the wild, when I do. One of the logos in happiest to have designed. #nbsignsoriginaldesigns

I just heard, via @mysticbluesigns, that there was some conversation among the Pre-Vinylettes "about pointing finger icons from a female POV", so I thought I'd share these panels from either side of our front door. IIRC, @spooky_orbison drew the left pointing hand and @sign_syndicalist drew the right.

Me and my old lady finally dragged our lazy bums up to the sign painting show at RVCA, on the intersection of Haight & Ashbury, to appreciate the pieces on display from so many New Bohemia alumni--@allthingsmeng, @josephrivas1r and @napang.b (both more recently of @memorysignco) and @coolhandken all had pieces on the wall! Meng also painted the list of participating artists, in the front window, and we supplied a bunch of sign shop detritus to decorate the window display. Plus, we put the gold leaf around their entry, WAY back when they opened, and I gotta say it's holding up remarkably well! Our peeps have put the brush to a few other spots around that corner over the years.

The nifty electrical signage in that halftime show inspired me to plug in this triple-paned, gilded, painted, and hand-cut one-way mirrored vinyl lit-up piece I did for an art show, a decade ago.

A couple new gilded signs for our erstwhile neighbors, currently moving away from SOMA, to be closer to the Pacific Heights clientele they serve. Now, the question is, ought we move our office and showroom over to next door, and double our display window count and street frontage...?

Forty-five tip cans ready for delivery to all the @gottsroadside locations! Dust off your cash wad, and get ready to GO OUT TO EAT!

Still a bit of cleanup to do around the trim, but I'm REAL happy with the way my new @dk_roman Velvet Burnishing Set has pulled the faux facets out of the large letters in this sign for a new "cheese, charcuterie, and picnic provisions store", coming soon to 9th Ave, near Golden Gate Park.

Another trace-and-replace, in an old transom gild. The neighbors at 440 have been much more careful with cleaning their transom than those maniacs in 438!

We got to paint a 30"x30" version of a 96"x96" mural we painted on a living room wall of someone's home, on Clementina Alley, around the corner from the shop, 6 or 7 years ago. A former tenant has moved to another state and wanted a reminder of the place to be shipped out. #nbsignsoriginaldesigns

Just rolled out to the Sunset to roll out some sign-restoring clear over a sign I installed with the help of @tau_au, in 2003, back before I started subcontracting all our installation work. Thanks to the north facing aspect, these out-of-the-can colors have held up AMAZINGLY well! The black shadows are the only place that's really faded significantly. Here are also the preliminary sketches and color studies for the sign, from the colored pencil mockup days! I'd have done those S's, in Peasant Pies, differently, today. I admire the adventurousness I showed with the date. #nbsignsoriginaldesigns

Here's a gild we laid on a window at a dispensary that's been operating in the lower reaches of Nob Hill since back in the medicinal-only days.

Was flipping thru a sketchbook, and coming across these #rejectedsketches, from some years back, I realized I'd just seen some publicity about this product coming to market in the past week or so--durable, vegan faux leather. I hope they got a decent logo, because I was pretty fond of these sketches! Guess I was a bit too literal minded about the reishi shape.

Fresh window and door gilds for this Fillmore St. antique shop, incorporating letters based on a salvaged pre-quake sign hanging at the back of the shop ("Jacob's Garments", faintly visible, above the gild in the window to the right). Door monogram has 18k matte gold centers.

Here's our first scaffold-free looks at this mural we spent several weeks in Nov and Dec, helping Hughen/Starkweather bring to completion, in a new... (hmm, I THINK this means the NDA is expired?) Gehry-designed FB campus, in Menlo Park

There are a quarter of a BILLION people, striking and marching in the streets in India right now, in support of farmers and workers, against Modi's inhumane corporatist far-right agenda, and I was BARELY aware of it until some flag waving caravans crossed my path to work in SF, today! We did good, in America, last month, by tossing the Clown-King, but working people's needs are only going to demand more attention and advocacy around the world, in the year to come, as the rich keep killing the commoners, to keep their hoarded cash to themselves. These are signs I painted for an art show, about a decade ago, inspired by decorated timber lorries I saw at a depot in Aleppey, Kerala, India. May seem selfish, but the best way to help oneself is join forces with one's neighbours!

When your colors & lines so crispit looks like photoshop one of two biggies for A Huevo restaurant in the city

Never too early to get them strokes down! Lil Ramona sets up next to her pops while they both work along our practice lettering posters! Get yours from our shop

Custom welded shapes Laurie’s friend made that we got to paint for her hat shop where she creates hats from scratch! Love how much movement it shows. Madge is so darling too

Susan’s magnet signs for @earthly_gardens needed some tlc and tlc was definitely given! Swipe for what it looked like before our touch-up and where it’s usually slapped on

New workplace safety sign in the window

Before and after #nbsignsoriginaldesigns

Congratulations to everyone involved in the Historic Guerneville Bank Building's restoration, recipient of the 2020 Preservation Design Award for Rehabilitation! We painted a couple Jessica Hische-designed murals there, in 2015, and a big exterior sign summoning people to their wine-tasting room, a couple years thereafter. They serve up delicious ice cream in this joint--well worth a visit, when you're in the Russian River Valley!

Painting these on 8 floors of the SFMoMA garage today, I have to keep reminding myself we're not in a fire emergency.

We painted a 3rd iteration of HOT BUNS, on the 3rd in D's lineage of spiffy late model Challengers! The maroon Dodge was painted up by @spooky_orbison in 2017, and the inscription on the paler orange one, upon which this year's version is directly based, was done by @goldenwestsignarts, some years before that. This time, we went for a flaming peach instead of cherries! @ New Bohemia Signs

Painted an office door, modeled on the cover of the first issue of Detective Comics, from 1937. FWIW, Jeff is an Asian man who collects ephemera featuring, um... questionable representations of Asians.

Everybody wish this guy the bestest birthday today! Big boss Damon Styer, owner and painter of New Bohemia Signs a man of many song & dance, he fills the shop with gruesome & interesting podcasts, reads full news articles with their respective accents, doesn’t like fruit or vegetables, and can drive a lift like Tokyo Drift. Bummer we can’t do it up properly for your 50th but the gang is wishing you the best one! Here’s Damon trying balut or ht vt ln, fertilized duck embryo, for the first time the other week. His expression is pretty exaggerated for the photo op but we are confirming he liked it

If you're trying to get into @devilscanyon, it's over there.

Hey, kids-- maybe you're already on top of this, but there are sessions about different aspects of sign painting and lettering being broadcast over Zoom, all day and into the night, via https://betterletters.co/lockdown/. Register for free, at that website (clickable link on the @betterletters home page), to tune in! In just over a couple hours, my shop manager, Scott, and I will spend the better part of an hour discussing how we price sign work in the SF Bay Area. 7:30pm, our time, 3:30am in London, and you'll have to figure out when it is where you are (literally, no more than 2h15m from when I'm writing this, so it shan't be long, or you've already missed it)! Maybe it'll show up on their YouTube channel afterwards? I dunno!

Got to regild 2359 Jackson, after a broken window, this week. I gilded both this and 2357 some dozen years ago or so, and since then, have drawn up a full set of numbers, in case you'd like a golden address that looks like this on your own home! @ San Francisco, California

Background painting for a neon can, coming soon to 6th St, SF. The lady's leg will kick up, in animated neon, when lit up. Cool! I'm compelled to note that I advocated on behalf of cleaner lettering, but the wonk was apparently intentional, and it's gonna be drowned out in bright red glowing tubes, in the end! @ Neon Works

Some worksites are more appealing than others: painting a background on a can at Neon Works, in Oakland, today.

In shop briefly, today, to finish cherry blossom illustration for this little plaque, bound for someone's shed, I think?

For a new salon hoping to open later this summer. Design by @missdaniellemoore