You’ve done everything 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 genius 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 achieve 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 a level.
What you will need
The first thing you will need to get this project started is a copy of the logo that you want to enlarge and reproduce. Fortunately, finding a good copy of your team logo is as easy as searching for the “team name” + logo in the image search feature of your favorite search engine. One big pitfall of 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 will print clearly. Also, you want to make sure that the image you use doesn’t have a filled 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 supplies, consider using brushes of different sizes; larger ones to cover larger areas of color and smaller ones for black details and outlines. Make sure to also pick up some paint that matches the colors of the logo.
Lastly, you’ll want to have a tape measure, a level, and a stick to build a grid on the wall.
Using the grid method
The grid method has been used by artists for centuries for the purpose of enlarging and transferring images to other drawing surfaces. However, don’t worry if you are not artistically inclined; this method is really simple.
1. First, you will need to print your logo on a sheet of plain paper. Make sure there is a little white space around the edges of the image in your print.
2. Now, using a ruler in 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 filled with one-inch by one-inch squares inside the box.
4. Now, using your pencil, level, measuring stick, and tape measure, draw a larger corresponding grid on the wall where you want the logo to go. Try different scales on paper before committing to one. Calculate what the dimensions of your logo would be if you made your grid with 6-by-6-inch boxes (or 8-by-8-inch boxes) instead and see if that fits into your allotted space on the wall.
5. Once you have your grid on the wall, take your pencil and begin transferring the logo, box by box, from your small grid to the larger grid. If you find it difficult to get the correct lines and curves in a particular area, just draw additional lines on your small grid and on the wall grid to give you more reference points.
6. All that is left now is to paint over your pencil lines and fill in your logo colors. Make sure to take a step back and check your work against the logo on your little grid to make sure things still line up and look great.
Hand painting a huge team logo on your wall like this is an extremely fun and rewarding project to undertake and will make your Cave of Man 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 scratch their heads trying to figure out how you did it.