Painting a design

Howard Caplan

Wooden Canoe Maniac
I have a windchime outside my house with a decrotive "native" style design on made of, I think copper. I was thinking about trying to get that design transferred to the canoe during painting.
I can remove the decrotive part that I want to reproduce and I am thinking about tracing it onto cardboard and making a stencil of it to paint it on the boat. Is there a better way of doing this?
Thanks,
Howard
 
Depending upon how much you want to invest and whether or not you need one design or some sort of repeating pattern, this might be a good option. Start-up cost for the basic kit is about $40, but the process is simple and works well with excellent detail.

http://www.store.cbridge.com/pc/STP-KIT/KIT-STP-001/Basic+Starter+Kit+with+StencilPro

It's basically do-it-yourself silk screening. You get a couple of sheets of light sensitive, coated silk screen fabric. You lay a black and white image from your printer on top of the fabric, expose it to sunlight for a specified period of time and then wash it in water. The sunlight "fixes" the blocking coating on the exposed areas and the coating washes off from the spots that were sun-shielded by the black ink on your original printed copy. Once it's washed clean, you have a very clear silk screen of your original design. I've been using artist's acrylic paint for silk screen ink, which is cheap and works pretty well, but other types of water or oil-based paints and inks can be used. You tape the screen to the surface you want to print on, squeegee the ink over the thing in a smooth pass and peel up the screen.

For a single design, it might be over-kill compared to a small can of enamel, a paint brush or cardboard stencil and a steady hand, but for things like logos on paddles for builders or repeating patterns along the gunwale, this stuff is pretty neat and worth knowing about. This photo shows the screen. The pink stuff is the blocking coating. The white areas are the bare screen mesh where the coating was washed away during the developing process. They make two grades of screen. This is the fine, high-def mesh for small detailed images. There is also one with bigger mesh for images where the printed lines aren't so small.
 

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