A few months ago I was contacted by one of my rowing industry friends with a need to find some timber oars for a project.

Aside from being a handy oarsman, lovely fella, and a very talented cabinet maker, Rob has created some very unique rowing related pieces of furniture and art. His website has some lovely images in the galleries.

Rob was creating a special ceiling light fitting for a client that used a number of oar blades. At first I was imagining something a bit like a ceiling fan, but he had come up with something much more clever than that. It wasn’t until he returned the blades to me for painting that I could see how clever he had been.

Once I had painted up the blades in the assorted club colours that the client and their family had rowed for, Rob did the final assembly and installation.

I think you’ll agree that this works very well!

With this year’s Fours Head approaching, I thought I should do a post showing how I dealt with the fine detail in the new event logo that was introduced last year.

There have been many changes and new things happening with this popular event, and one of these was the adoption of a new logo and brand identity. Changing the colour of the trophy blades wasn’t going to be much of an issue, but the organisers thought it might be nice to use the new logo.

After some discussion, I said that I could do it, but only if the text was removed. This would make it a bit easier to paint, would make more room on the final design layout, and would prevent repetition with the main title painted along the top of the blade.

However, it would still be a complicated job to do well. Or would it? It was time to cheat…

Luckily one of my very talented friends from the rowing industry has a vinyl cutter and is very handy with it. With his help we created a suitable stencil that could deal with much of the detail, but yet also be easy to apply and – most importantly – be easy to remove!

It wasn’t all simplicity and plain sailing from there, but it was a lot easier than manually masking up the 4 shape seven times!

Once the basic design was applied and the details added, then it was time for the text and crew names.

I’ve only just realised (or rather ‘remembered’) that I haven’t done a post for almost a year!

Rest assured that I have been busy and that I’ll gather some images of some more recent jobs soon.