Paint Paint Paint
I paint a lot of 5/4 by 6 pressure treated wood boards in different lengths. Most of the boards you see here are 4’ in length and painted in tremclad yellow, red and green. Since its oil based you can use turpentine or lacquer thinner to thin the paint. However the gas station and engine oil logos are all painted with acrylic and the board hangs on the wall using a tile hanger bracket you can buy off Temu. Remember that a 5/4 board will be 1” in thickness so use the appropriate tile hanger Sometimes I might print out a template and use that to outline the logo and sometimes the logo might be free hand and sometimes a mixture of both. Initially I just wanted to do gas station logos but then mixed it up with engine oil brands as well. Yellow is comparatively easy to paint on, as almost all the colors stand out.
Once yellow was done, I moved onto red. For the red boards I used tremclad gloss fire red. Its oil based and one or two coats is fine because with pressure treated deck boards it’s never going to be perfect. One thing I noticed on the 5/4 red deck boards is that yellow and white stand out the most. Black and green look okay but not as good as yellow and white. Also, I wanted to keep the original logo colors so Castrol had to be green and Petro Canada had to be on a black maple leaf.
On the Tremclad John Deere green colored deck boards, I noticed that red and white acrylic paint stood out the most. While I was doing the fourth green colored deck board, the board warped a bit. That’s the problem with cheap deck boards is that they twist after you dry them. Lesson learnt. Next time I will use 5/4 cedar boards rather than pressure treated ones. Once I knew that the board was warped, I stopped painting. Now the board has warped so much that I can’t even hang it on a tile hanger.
Once done with yellow, red and green boards I wanted to try something different so I painted some leftover deck boards, in satin black. To my surprise they turned out to be really good. On both these boards I tried experimenting with shadowing the letters, something I did often in school when I used to get bored but never on this scale.
I also wanted to experiment with some ford blue colored deck boards. This deck board is almost 6’ in length and to paint something on this scale with a free hand takes a lot of patience and skill
Back in 2024 this was my first effort in painting deck boards. These deck boards are 2 by 10 and at that time I only hand painted one logo.
I am still painting more deck boards at the time of writing this. Still learning every day but now will only use 5/4 cedar boards for any future projects.
I have also experimented painting oil barrels. Initially I wanted to paint it as a giant Campbells soup can but then kept it confined to automotive art. Once again, I used Tremclad or Rust-Oleum. Even though these paints do not require a primer, I found that the surface came out much nicer, smoother if I used a metal-based primer, sanded it down using 180-220 grits and then used the oil-based paint. No air compressor or paint gun was used to paint these barrels so they were all hand painted using a brush. The legs are all 5.9 inch tapered and riveted to the base of the barrel using a mounting plate. Each barrel has three legs each at 120 deg. The legs can be screwed on and off to the mounting plate. The top lid of the barrel was cut off using an angle grinder. This is the only way to clean all the oil from the barrel. A 1” by 24” wood round sits on top of the barrel on a U-shaped rubber trim which gives it a nice clean look. The barrel can also be used for storage. Here the barrels are painted in John Deere Green. The logos are hand painted in acrylic.
The v8 logo that was popular on the ford truck in the 1950’s is hand painted on the left barrel. It is still incomplete as I wanted to put it inside a white circle. Circles are the hardest to hand paint so I left it for the end but never got around to it. On these two oil barrels I wanted to try a different shade of ford blue. The logo is inspired from the valve cover design of the 302/351 small block motor. To hand paint a logo on this scale does require patience. I wanted to try something different so I painted the 6-legged dog from ENI. Black is relatively easy to hand paint so this barrel was not much work, maybe a couple of days to paint in gloss white and a day and a half to paint the dog. It is still incomplete since the dog needs to go in a yellow square. You can see that the top lip is covered in a U-shaped rubber trim. The 1” by 24” round board sits flat on this rubber edge.
