I appreciate everyone's advice. I would love to spend a day with an experienced sign painter, I just haven't been able to find one near me. As far as why I want to learn how to do this, there are really a number of reasons I guess. I started my business with intentions to pretty much only do fire department work. I have branched out into a wider spectrum of work since then, but the majority of what I do is still fire department related. I have done a lot of research to learn about traditional fire apparatus lettering and gold leaf, which caused me to order everything I needed to do authentic hand gilded gold leaf because the vinyl stuff just wasn't impressing me anymore. So I've been working on my gilding skills and researching that, which caused me to stumble onto some websites that had examples of reverse glass work. So I ordered some more stuff and now I'm trying to teach myself how to do that also. But at some point I realized that all of this gilding stuff is based off of hand lettering skills, so that is why I want to learn. I guess my interests don't really fit my age. All this new digitally printed stuff really doesn't do much for me, but I could spend hours looking at old hand lettered trucks and reverse glass shop windows.
