Vienna’s Last Signpainter

Helmut Wollmersdorfer
Helmut Wollmersdorfer Posts: 213
in Type History
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

  • Alex Kaczun
    Alex Kaczun Posts: 164
    Very nice & interesting. As a type designer I found this video inspiring. Thank you for sharing. Josef Samuel is a master signpainter. Beautiful work.
  • Helmut Wollmersdorfer
    Helmut Wollmersdorfer Posts: 213
    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.
  • Nick Cooke
    Nick Cooke Posts: 209
    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. 
  • Craig Eliason
    Craig Eliason Posts: 1,510
    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 Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,235
    Craig Eliason said:
    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?
  • Nick Curtis
    Nick Curtis Posts: 118
    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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