You’ve done all you can to make your Man Cave the envy of your friends, but you still yearn for something more. Something that will give your sports room an extra touch of cool that no one else has thought of. Perhaps all you need now is an enlarged hand-painted logo of your favorite sports team adorning the wall. You may have heard of other Man Cave owners who had to use expensive high-tech projectors and other equipment to accomplish this, but there is another ancient method of enlarging images that the masters used centuries ago. Even better, the method I’m going to cover in this article doesn’t require any special equipment other than a tape measure and level.
what you will need
The first thing you’ll need to get this project up and running is a copy of the logo you want to enlarge and reproduce. Fortunately, finding a good copy of your team logo is as easy as searching for your “team name” + logo in the image search function of your favorite search engine. A big difficulty with getting images from the web is that most web graphics are pixelated and grainy. Try to find an image that is relatively large (700-800 pixels wide or tall) so that it prints clearly. Also, you want to make sure that the image you use doesn’t have a busy background. Gradients, patterns, and other distracting background elements can make it difficult to reproduce on the wall. Fortunately, the Internet is full of places where you can find high-resolution versions of your team’s logo.
As for your painting materials, consider using brushes of different sizes; larger ones to cover larger areas of color and smaller ones for details and black outlines. Be sure to also pick up some paint that matches the colors of the logo.
Lastly, you’ll want to have a tape measure, level, and yardstick to build a grid on the wall.
Using the grid method
The grid method has been used by artists for centuries in order to enlarge and transfer images to other drawing surfaces. However, don’t worry if you’re not artistically inclined; this method is really simple.
1. First, you will need to print your logo on a plain sheet of paper. Make sure there is a little white space around the edges of the image on your print.
2. Now, using a ruler on the white space surrounding the image, you want to draw a box around the logo. To make the following steps as easy as possible, you should round the height and width of the box to the nearest inch.
3. Next, create a grid with one inch by one inch squares inside the box.
4. Now using your pencil, level, yardstick and tape measure, draw a corresponding larger grid on the wall where you want the logo to go. Try out different scales on paper before committing to one. Figure out what the dimensions of your logo would be if you made your grid out of 6 x 6-inch boxes (or 8 x 8-inch boxes) and see if that fits in the allotted space on the wall.
5. Once you have your grid on the wall, take your pencil and start transferring the logo, frame by frame, from your small grid to the larger grid. If you find it difficult to get the lines and curves right in a particular area, simply draw additional lines on your small grid and wall grid for more reference points.
6. All that’s left now is to paint over the pencil lines and fill in the colors for your logo. Be sure to step back and compare your work to the logo on your small grid to make sure things are still lined up and looking good.
Hand painting a large team logo on the wall like this is an extremely fun and rewarding project to undertake and will make your Man Cave even more personalized than before. The great thing about doing this type of project yourself is that not only will your result be truly unique, but your friends will be scratching their heads trying to figure out how you did it.