Clover Signs Blog

I just wrote an article about acrylic paint, which tells in broad strokes why it is so great for signs.

We often get questions like “Why is my sign unvarnished? What can I do to protect it?”

The answer is simple - nothing! The acrylic paint we use is great for outdoors, and because we don’t varnish it, it can always be touched up in a number of years.

Acrylic paints stay bright and don’t yellow like oil paints do. They are ideal for signs and outdoor artwork.

Here is a beautifully done sign by one our artists:

We do all our art by hand and never print our signs. This means that we can put any picture you want onto one of our hand painted signs! Lots of people see our gallery and think that’s all they can have. If you need something custom made, just ask.

Holidays are never long enough. We just made a sign from someone who wished to extend theirs with a picture. Our artists were able to copy their favourite holiday snap, creating a long-lasting reminder of a summer day in Spain. Unfortunately, the first attempt by our artists was in the wrong proportions, not leaving adequate space for the desired text. The painting was so stunning, however, that we could not face simply binning it. Somebody had the bright idea to put it in a driftwood frame to produce a brilliant piece of art. The frame is not real driftwood, but a more durable HDU imitation. Check out the final house sign, as well as the one we messed up - decide for yourself which came out nicer!

On our house signs website, we offer a lot of standard signs for people to choose from.  However, we can create almost anything (like the above example shows.)  The best way to get something like this is to fill in the form on our custom signs page.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and some of our customers obviously agree. In addition to ordinary house signs, we are occasionally asked to make signs which have no words, just a hand painted image. Here are two examples, a fish and three badgers, painted in a matching style:

To see a gallery of available artwork, or to request a custom picture, go to our image gallery.

Fairies and butterflies are some of the most popular things to have on a house sign. Our customers frequently request images like this one:

Try an image like this one on Slate!

Every so often we get a request for a 3D Sculpture. Although this is obviously quite a lot of work, some of the results are truly amazing. Check out this fairy tale scene -

Using HDU makes sculpture much easier than when using wood. HDU has no grain and is easier to carve. The person with the chisel still needs to have an artistic eye though.

This sign is carved out of one thick piece of HDU. You can easily request a sculpted sign using our custom sign page.

Winnie the Pooh has got to be one of England’s most popular storybook characters as well as being a personal favourite of mine. We have done quite a few Pooh Bear house signs now. Here is a scene from the hundred-acre woods that I think is really nice:

Of course the thing that makes it great is the fact that it is based on the original artwork by Ernest Shepard rather than the Disney cartoons. (Apologies for the mis-misspelling of ‘Hunny’ on the sides - obviously a bit of a slip-up!)

If you like this click through for a gold on green sign.

Here is our most popular piece of artwork from last month:

Pheasants seem to be popular on country cottages and look great on dark green or black.

This week’s most requested pictures for our hand painted house signs seem to be trains. We have painted 3 different trains for customers - so if you want a train on yours, now would be a good time (as we are getting good at them!)

Here is one we have just done.