Harley Logo - Sepia Tone

It seems that life tends to sweep me away from posting for a couple months at a time. Between writing a book for my new Grandson, full-time work, finishing a sign and getting through the holidays, it not too hard to see where the time has gone?

I did get a good start on my sepia tone basement wall mural and wanted to share the progress. (Here is a link to the wall prep for this project).

In some ways, the sepia tone technique is new to me so I will describe the process as I go along. In my last post, I included a couple of images of the old Harley Davidson art that I was hoping to paint on the wall. I really like the sepia tone look of the board racer image and decided to paint the old Harley logo in the same colors.

The very first step in this process is to purchase the paint that will be needed to complete the mural. A short while before we started this project, my wife and I stumbled upon some new paint to try. Rust-Oleum produces a water-based metallic line that comes in 2 oz. trial size containers. We ended up buying four colors that we thought would best match the sepia tone pallet we had in mind for the board racer mural. These colors have a pearl like appearance so we were not sure how well they were going to match the Nova Color acrylics, but it's worth a try?

Next step was to project the image on the wall as large as we could make it. I used an overhead projector with our art, inkjet printed on clear transparency film.









I used a #2 pencil to sketch the logo on the wall. Because there is always some distortion caused by the projector, I had to go back in with a level to correct some lines. This is especially apparent when there is vertical lines on the wall to compare the layout to.




Next up, I started to apply some of the Metallic Accent colors on the wall following the pencil layout lines. The champagne color below is not wet, but it is metallic so it reflects light at certain angles.




The Rust-Oleum Metallic Accent colors tended to go on a bit light and usually required two coats. Even with two coats, some "pooling" of paint still occurred. I believe that this was the result of applying water-based paint over the WaterTite oil-based water proofing wall paint. This "pooling" effect actually made the Rich Brown accent color take on a worn leather or suede look. Even with the unexpected color results, the Accent paints look like they bonded well with the base coat.

Here is the logo with a couple of the colors completed. I don't recall ever seeing the Harley logo done in sepia tone, so I made up my own color pallet.




Here is the finished logo...





My next post will show the layout and painting of the board racer portion of the mural. I'm looking forward to exploring further, the process of sepia tone painting with Nova Color Artist Acrylics.