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Learning Wall Doggin'... video

Arlo Kalon 2.0

New Member
I just came across this excellent little documentary. It reminds me a lot of my early years in sign painting and the guys I worked with. I was especially struck by a comment in it about how many years it would take to attain the ability to do this... something we routinely see newbies in here refusing to accept. Enjoy.
http://vimeo.com/11175747
 

round man

New Member
Exceptional!!!!! You will never know unless you have been there,... it damn sure ain't for everyone,...they even use a swing stage,with rope falls,....brings back alot of memory's from days past,..Arlo I agree it took me two years hard dangerous work as a helper/apprentice after I went to art school for a few years, before the company I worked for would let me go out by myself with a helper,and that was for straight copy only it took another 4 before they would turn me loose on pictorals,...most guys took almost 4 years to gain journeyman copy(lettering only) painter status ,but they gave me credit for time in school,...
 

Arlo Kalon 2.0

New Member
Exceptional!!!!! ...they even use a swing stage,with rope falls,....most guys took almost 4 years to gain journeyman copy(lettering only) painter status

See, that was always my problem with this type of work - the terminology. I'd have preferred they be called "rope stays ups" instead of rope falls! I hear ya on the years required before ya got turned loose on your own layouts. The old timer master painters I worked with required me to learn very correct letter construction by hand. The people with computers totally bypass this now. More importantly, they required good composition in the layout... nobody is learning this anymore with computers as is evident by the multitude of WRONG layouts you can witness everywhere on any given day. If only the computer as a design tool had to be taught by the same methods as sign painting! Our communities would have been the better for it by being more devoid of the visual pollution of hack sign layouts. But I digress...
 

Craig Sjoquist

New Member
That was great to watch and listen to even though I'm still hand lettering and enjoy what I do.
It's just a job it's life worth enjoying.
 

Arlo Kalon 2.0

New Member
I especially like the scene where they are rolling out the pattern with two men and pouncing the charcoal powder on it as they go. I remember that being really tricky to do - you couldn't be off by the slightest bit on your placement. I also like the old guy's comments about his father starting out to learn sign painting by sweeping the floors for a few years as a "shop boy". I remember well doing the same thing just to be around the guys who could already paint signs - waiting my turn. The new breed of prima donna newbies would never entertain such an idea to learn this craft. Nowadays, it's all let me push the buttons and make some of the big money. All in all, this is a great little film about an ongoing passing of an era.
 

round man

New Member
I'm with ya on the terminology used Arlo,...hahahahaha the ground was always back behind us waiting to fly up and hit us in the butt! "Falls" seemed like a bad term to me also but I learned the hard way a couple of times how they came to be called that,....but that is another story,....The reason I was taught that the patterns were rolled out that way was to be able to do it on a windy day,..and besides tape isn't always the solution on masonry walls,..as with almost all the tasks to paint a wall it took two men working in unison,very dependant upon each other, and very trusting,...not much room for error 4 or 5 stories up onna wall,...
 

Gordy Saunders

New Member
Oh, those were the days. I wouldn't want to get up that high anymore, but I did my share of it in the day. Never used a swing stage. Did all of mine off from a 85' skyhook. No pictorials, just lettering. It was a long walk up.
 

Arlo Kalon 2.0

New Member
I once did a wall sign that was so big it took a gallon of paint to dot an "i".
Just one of the many stock repertoire of sign lies I learned from my heroes. I'll never forget most of my adventures on a swing stage. I sold a Farm Bureau co-op job once to do their logo on a concrete silo that was the tallest structure in this particular county. I swear it was 50 stories up to the bottom of the sign. The Dick sign painting family came and did it for me - Bob Dick and his sons Charlie and Dick Dick (for real). They were crazy dudes working up high. They used a stage plank with no back board that high up. I rode the rickety one man elevator to the top but chickened out on getting on the stage. The rest of the day I was relegated to doing the beer runs - yep, they also worked drunk that high up!
 

Si Allen

New Member
I gotta agree with my friend Round Man! This kind of work is not for everyone!

You have to be able to mentally assemble the parts in your head ... in order to put it all together correctly. Sometimes it is too big to use patterns.

Here's a couple of examples ... Ontario Mills is nearly 1/4 mile long and the letters are 75 feet with a 14 foot stroke!
 

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Arlo Kalon 2.0

New Member
You have to be able to mentally assemble the parts in your head ... in order to put it all together correctly.

I remember once climbing up onto a billboard to do a coat out of it for a repaint. There was a picture of a sports car on it that had been hand painted. From the ground, you could not tell it wasn't a photograph. Up close, I was struck by how crudely the chrome wheels had been painted - yet, from the ground they looked totally real. I often wondered how the guy who painted it would know how to make it look totally real from a distance. I never attained that level of pictorial skill before computers came along and mostly put an end to those kind of skills.
 

ddubia

New Member
Great film. Thank you for sharing this. I didn't know this work was even done this way anymore. I guess like the one painter said, "Blue and yellow make green, but we paint green so it can be richer." Printing will never totally take the place of hand work but my guess is that like many other things over the years the quality will drop a notch or two and become the "new" top-of-the-line once all the painters are gone.

I started before computers so I hand-lettered everything. Have done quite a few wall signs painted on the building. None so high though as the 24'H x 36'W painting of our city's logo on a water tower in town. It was 175 feet tall and I worked in the 150' to the top range.

I remember going to the job site for the first time just to ride up to the top. All I provided was the pattern and the knowledge of how to put the whole job together at that size. A contracting company who painted the entire tower provided the lift and paint which was some special concoction. They also provided me with a helper who was a very experienced painter. He'd never painted a sign before but when the letters are 6' high and no one can get any closer than 150' to it, well, it ain't lettering no more. He already know how to cut instead of just fill-in so that helped a lot.

Someone mentioned going up with no backboard. I refused to do that. We rode up on an aluminum "plank" which was 2' x 12' hoisted by two air powered wenches, (that each of us operated from their own end), that climbed a 1/2" steel cable. We found that one wench was slower than the other so one of us had to stop while the other guy caught up. Many, many times. I told the journeyman who set the job up that I wanted something secured behind me. We wore harnesses that attached to about a 1" dia. rope but that wasn't enough for me. He took a piece of conduit and loosely attached each end of it with some thin rope about 2' high behind us. Everyone of those guys laughed and I didn't find it one bit funny.

Since there was a contractor's painter going up to help me I finally figured that since he was willing I had to be as well. The laugh was on me. What I found is that there is no way in hell you step back for any reason what-so-ever. You are so conscious of where you're at that there is no stepping off by accident.

The hardest part of the ride was that the tower was the type that had a narrow vertical stem with a large cylinder on the top. The cables we were riding on hung down flat against the cylinder so when we got to that point our "wall" was directly overhead. So we had to push ourselves away from the cylinder while operating our wenches until our feet/plank was at the bottom and could ride against it. There was a rubber wheel centered on the plank that rode against the tower at that point. (There was another fun moment on the way down when the rubber wheel reached the bottom of the cylinder. We'd get it just to that point and then "1-2-3" we'd go down and the plank, with us on it, would swing toward the stem of the tower once again placing the wall of it right in our faces. We had to be prepared to hold ourselves away to keep from getting knocked off. It really wasn't that difficult because one becomes pretty damn strong facing a situation like that. After the first time there was nothing to it.)

Once we were against the wall of the cylinder the set up was as solid as being on the ground. We were slightly tilted toward the "wall" due to the cables top contact point was the top of the wall of the cylinder and at our end it was a foot or so away from it. That tension kept us solid as a rock. The wind had no effect on us.

All the way up, (and down for that matter), the set up was pushed by the wind into a swirling oval due to the stem being so far from us. That really wasn't so bad because the set up felt solid enough. But it was just a strange ride. Once, going down, I forgot to release the latch from our security rope and move it down and I was lifted about 4 inches off the plank. So I'm hanging there and can't reach my wench. The other guy had to walk over, reach around me and wench the plank back up to my feet. That's the kind of thing that only happens to me one time.


I had 10 sheets of pounced paper that ranged from 10' long to 24' long and 4' wide. The pattern was made with an opaque projector at night on the back of large block garage wall that was 11' feet high. My cousin, who'd never done anything like it before but has a good head for that sort of thing helped me. Tracing it in sections and hand pouncing it took us 10 hours.

My plan was to pounce the entire thing on and be sure it was positioned correctly before painting. But the night before I realized that at that size I wouldn't be able to tell from the close vantage point on the scaffold if it was right or not and I damn sure couldn't go to the ground and see it from there.

My decision then was to start at the bottom and roll it on from the bottom up, spraying paint from spray cans in lieu of chalk dust, and painting that section as we rolled it back down and off. We did each section that way and the entire job took 9 hours over two days as one day the wind was way too bad to ride that contraption so we had to quit early.

This was a job I could not get a deposit for. I argued the point but the contractor said, "What if I give you a 50% deposit and you go out an blow it on wine, women and song then come here on Monday and find that you can't go up that high? Not everyone can." I had to concede because I didn't know myself if I could go that high. He offered to buy all the materials I put on a list, (they provided the special paint), and we'd square up once the job was completed. I felt really unsure of that deal but I couldn't argue with the possibility that I would not be able to go so high.

Well, the job went great. It got done much quicker than I expected due to my change in the pouncing process. The contractor came to the job site to see how it was going just as we were coming down for the last time. "Man, you really took me on that one", he chided. Then said with a big grin, "It looks great from the road!" Within 20 minutes we walked to his truck and settled up with him writing me a check. He was happy that the job was done ahead of schedule and I was happy to be down from there.

As you can tell I don't know the proper terminology of all this stuff either. But it got done and very well I might add.

Funny little story. About 3 months later my 5 year old son and I drove past that tower and he pointed to it saying, "There's that tower dad!". I said, "Yeah pal, it's pretty cool." He then looked up at me and said with a big grin, "Yep, and when you're gone I'm gonna tell everybody I did it!" He's 21 now and smiles when he remembers that.

Sorry to go on and on but I haven't told that story to anyone for a long, long time. And whenever I did it was never to anyone who could actually relate to it until just now.
 

Cross Signs

We Make Them Hot and Fresh Everyday
Arlo:
Great video. I still have my "Electro pounce". Some real nice story's to be reading on a Sunday morning.
 

Arlo Kalon 2.0

New Member
Where's Jill's opinion of the video? In fact, no sign gals have chimed in. I only remember 1 lady walldog, and she was a daughter-in-law to the Bob Dick sign painting family mentioned earlier.
 

SignosaurusRex

Active Member
I don't mean to pirate this thread, but does anyone know of any Wall Dog meets this summer? I'd love to get in on some action again. I never knew about the Pontiac meet this past year until it was over. Its been far to long since I've gotten in on any outdoor wall jobs and I love this kind of work. My brushes need to see some action!
 
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