Vienna’s Last Signpainter

A nice video about a now retired signpainter. Not exactly typography. Viennese dialect with English subtitles.

https://www.tomkoch.net/typetraveldiary/item/508-vienna-s-last-signpainter-documentary

Comments

  • Very nice & interesting. As a type designer I found this video inspiring. Thank you for sharing. Josef Samuel is a master signpainter. Beautiful work.
  • Shame on me I never took the time to visit him or his museum. It's just a walk of 2.1 km (1.3 miles) from my home.
  • Thanks for this. I didn’t know about this when I was there 2 weeks ago, but I’ll make a point of going next time I visit. 
  • Interesting video. I was surprised to see, in the couple of scenes of him at work, that he seemed to paint outlines then fill them in, doing both with a smaller brush than I expected. Struck me as an inefficient process for somebody in the business for decades (or at the end of a family in the business for generations). 
  • John SavardJohn Savard Posts: 1,088
    Interesting video. I was surprised to see, in the couple of scenes of him at work, that he seemed to paint outlines then fill them in, doing both with a smaller brush than I expected. Struck me as an inefficient process for somebody in the business for decades (or at the end of a family in the business for generations). 

    To do things efficiently, but yet produce fine quality work, it is entirely reasonable to use quite a small brush for painting the outlines, and then a fairly small brush to fill in the part of the letters nearest the outlines. Then switch to a larger brush, once enough is filled in that the larger brush has no chance of going over the edges.
    But can one do so, and yet maintain an even thickness of paint over the whole letter?
  • Sign-painters usually mix their paint so that it has just the right "pull" to it, which allows for a consistent amount of paint being transferred to the work surface, no matter what brush is used.
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