Faythe Levine and Sam Macon’s “Sign Painters” is the kind of book you buy as a present for someone else because it looks cool and then can’t part with yourself. The photographs are what draw you in ...

Before the age of computers and vinyl printers, sign painters worked by hand to illustrate storefronts, billboards and banners. Sign Painters, a... 'Sign Painters': A Close-Up Focus On An Endangered ...

“I thought that some day either someone needs to do a film about me, or I have to write about this,” said Phil Vandervaart. He was explaining how his work as a sign painter has been for love, rather ...

TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online ...

Lester Carey parks his shopping cart full of paint supplies on the neutral ground on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard near Claiborne Avenue. Carey, dressed in a red shirt tucked into high-waisted ...

Installation view of The Pre-Vinylette Society: An International Showcase of Women Sign Painters at Chicago Art Department (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic) CHICAGO — In 2012, people ...

There was a time, as recently as the 1980s, when storefronts, murals, banners, barn signs, billboards and even street signs were all hand-lettered with brush and paint. Today, the proliferation of ...

The title of “Sign Painters” tells you exactly what this documentary’s about. Yet it’s also highly misleading. A movie with a title like that — about a subject like that — must be pretty drab, right?

Sean Starr coats his angled Fitch brush in the white, oil-based 1 Shot paint. With a steady hand, he slowly rounds the brush to perfectly line the outside of an uppercase O. The sign reads “MORRISSEY ...