NASCAR Subway Sign

I, like everyone else, have seen these all over blogland in some form or the other. I decided to choose something that meant something to us. My husband loves NASCAR and so I wanted to do this for him for Father's Day to say thank you for being such a great dad to our son. I started with a 24 X 36 canvas I got with a 50% off coupon from Michael's. I then used my SCAL software to cut all the different names of the tracks out of some vinyl colors that I don't use. I tried this with contact paper on another project, but it bled through on some of the numbers so I used vinyl for this. Here is a picture of them after I cut them and laid them out like I wanted.

I then spraypainted my canvas with some Krylon Khaki spraypaint as my base coat. Next was probably the most difficult part at first. The vinyl was not cooperating with me and sticking to the canvas so the first three or four aren't exactly straight. I had to pretty much peel them off of the transfer tape letter by letter. I was ready to give up. Then I remembered I had bought some Elmer's spray adhesive, so I sprayed the adhesive down and then placed the name down and that seemed to do the trick. It went much faster after that. The only thing was the spacing. I spaced a little too much at the top and when I got down towards the bottom they ended up close together. Oh, well, it gives it character, right? Here is a another picture with all the names on the canvas. You see where it starts to go wrong after Talladega and Texas? By then it was too late to go back.

Now comes the fun part. I spraypainted the whole canvas with black spraypaint. I used what I had, which was the cheap WalMart black glossy paint. I would have preferred a flat paint. Anyway, after that dried I peeled all the letters off. This was my favorite part. I was scared I couldn't get the ones off with the spray adhesive, but they came off so smoothly. I took a picture of the next couple of steps too. I actually remembered to take pictures as I went this time. This picture shows the black spraypaint and where I started peeling off the letters.

For the final steps, I used some sandpaper and roughed it up a bit and then added some RL

smoke glaze to make it look a little more aged. It was a fun project and I can't wait to put some more words on a canvas.