Freak Show Sign

Wooden Freak Show sign 38cm wide x 40cm tall and printed directly on to high quality MDF.

There is quite a story behind the creation of this Freak Show sign design! Before we sold signs online we were a prop hire company for 12 years using traditional sign writing to create beautiful vintage style signs on reclaimed wood. One day I hit the jackpot when we found a load of signs in a skip that had been removed from a local pub getting refurbished. I immediately asked the builders if I could have them and they said yes. There were a least 10 highly crafted signs with beautiful wooden borders. However....it was just me standing by the skip and I was a 10 minute walk away from my work, probably a 15 minute walk carrying just one of the heavy signs. I didn't want anyone else to take the signs I had just found so I wasn't quite sure what to do. But like it was fate, at that exact moment a horse and cart walked past. I immediately flagged them down and offered them £10 to take the signs down the road for me - which they happily did. I still can't believe what a stroke of luck that was!

The pub was called the Port Royal, and the map artwork contained the history of the Port Royal. The paint work was incredibly flakey so most of it came off. What was left I added a similar base colour to cover up the remaining writing allowing a fresh surface for new text. You can see in the sign we created and subsequent digital artwork the words Port Royal just above the 'A' of Freak. There is also some other bits of text left but these words are much harder to make out. When I added the base layer of paint I didn't fully cover up the words as I thought it gave the sign a vintage look and also honoured the signs original use. So the map scroll details were what I kept from the original sign. The rest of the sign I painted in red, black and white. The text Freak Show has no connection to the original sign I must point out! It just so happened that as the time of acquiring these signs we were working on a circus themed event.

In December 2023 we decided to close our prop hire company and sell off all of our props. At this point I decided to digitally recreate some of our signs we'd hired over the years. This brought together a hybrid of hand designed signs, digitally remastered to create something new using the best of both worlds. It is now how I design most of my signs.