A Banner Day

In this edition of WHO AM I WEDNESDAY, I'll be opening up with a short video entry.  And, here it is!  Enjoy!

All right, so based on the video, you probably know what I'm going to be doing for this entry.  It's something that I talked about a little bit in Monday's entry...about how I was working on a special project for the upcoming RELAY FOR LIFE entry that I will be participating in.  

Well, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what I have planned for the event, which takes place on June 13-14, 2014.  As I talked about in the video above, I plan on welcoming all of you to the Relay for Life event here in my hometown by doing a series of videos from the actual event periodically so that you can have a better idea of what happens during the Relay.

Mind you, they won't be posted live from the event...I highly doubt that the track in which we'll be walking on has convenient Wi-Fi access.  But sometime next week, I'll be making it happen.  Who knew my iPod doubled as a video camera?

Of course, I'll be uploading pictures from the event as well...just to give all of you the feeling like you were there with me, cheering our team on!  Trust me, it'll be great.

Until then, I'll tease you with the first part of my Relay for Life 2014 coverage, which is that special project that I was working on.  You see, prior to 2014, we had a lady who worked in the produce department who designed all of our banners for the event.  Have a look at the banner she did for us a couple of years ago that we used for the 2012 and 2013 events.

Not bad, huh?

Well, this year, she officially left the company for good, and the team needed someone to design the banner for the 2014 event.  And, well...I decided to step in and take the initiative.

There was just one problem.  I have never done a banner in my life.  In fact, when it comes to arts and crafts, I very rarely used paint at all.  I was always more of a coloured pencil kind of guy.

So, this was definitely a challenge.  But what do I always say?  I love a challenge!

Okay, so the supplies I had to work with were...

1 gigantic piece of white fabric

4 large tubes of waterproof fabric paint (red, blue, yellow, white)

6 pie plates
9 paintbrushes

10 fabric markers in various colours
7 small spray bottles of neon coloured paint (red, pink, orange, purple, green, blue, yellow)

2 small bottles of fabric paint (red, blue)
1 pair of old shoes

1 No. 2 pencil
1 box of paper towels
1 bottle of multi-purpose surface cleaner

(The last two items will make sense later.)

By the way, here was my original blueprint for the banner.  Those blue splotches are from my paint-splattered hands.

So, to begin, I had to take the basic colours that I had and mix them together to make some pastel colours.  You know, green is made from blue and yellow, and so on. 

Some colours turned out great, like the orange, light blue, and light green.  But for some reason, my purple ended up becoming a cement colour.  If I do another banner, I'll just buy purple paint instead.

And, then I took the shoes, painted the soles of them with the coloured paint, and stamped them all around the border like this.

The reason for the shoes?  We're the Cancer Kickers, and unless you like doing things in the non-conformist way, most people kick with their feet!

Now, some people told me after the fact that they would have done it with bare feet around the border, and I agree that it would have been awesome if we could have done it this way.  But since the only day off before the relay was on Monday and my living space isn't big enough to work on a banner, I just did it in my workplace's training room (with permission from the management team, of course).  It would have been too messy doing it that way.

(Besides, when I was working on the banner, the paint soaked right through the fabric onto the tables that I was working on!!!  Now you understand why I needed the cleaning solution!)

Anyway, once the border was completed, it was time to work on the font.  And some people wondered where I got the font idea from.  I knew that I wanted to choose a font that was unique and stood out.  So, I looked all over the Internet for a font just like that.

Would you believe that a Kylie Minogue album inspired the choice of font?  It's true!  Have a look at the U.S. album cover for her 1989 album, "Enjoy Yourself".  Particularly take a look at the title.

PLEA TO THE AUDIENCE:  I have absolutely no idea what this font is called, but if anyone knows out there, please let me know so I can download it onto my own computer.  I absolutely love it!

Of course, it would be silly to blindly paint letters onto the canvas, so I sketched them out in pencil before hand.  As you can tell, I sort of screwed up the second "C", but nobody's perfect.  From a distance, you'll never be able to tell anyway.  Once the font was completed, I grabbed the small bottles of red and blue fabric paint (and whatever leftover yellow that I had), and did up the Cancer Kickers logo.  It was difficult to try and stay within the lines, but somehow, it turned out great.

I even used fabric markers to go around the red part of the logo.  The blue I left alone as I thought it looked better without the outlining.  Now, you will see some white spots around the border...that's because the paint didn't quite dry when I did the border.  I ended up getting some red dots on the sheet.  But that was fine because the neon paint was used to camouflage the mistakes that I made. 

And, here's the finished product!

Not bad for my very first banner, huh?