Decorating wooden plaques

I've been decorating wooden plaques for nearly two years now. Initially I just used tubes of acrylic paint and decorated them by hand with uni posca paint markers and embellishments. However, I hated seeing the paintbrush streaks and my handwriting was never quite neat/"arty" enough for my liking. 

Irritating paintbrush streaks

Poor handwriting

I've tried a gizzilion different sorts of pens and finally decided that for a professional look I am best using wooden letters. The prices of these vary but the cheapest I've found them so far is about 20p for a 4cm letter. Alternatively you can buy pots of 250+ self adhesive letters from amazon in arial font. One of these pots do go quite a long way, but it may be more economical to just buy the single letters to spell the words that you want rather than having a mountain of qs and xs that you'll never use.

Plaque made

I discovered a great secret to avoiding paintbrush streaks too... using spray acrylic paint instead. They give great coverage, they dry really quickly and I find that they're actually much more economical as I'm not applying 3-4 coats. My favourite is Kobra, which I buy from Graff City. Fab range of colours and if you buy in bulk (6+ cans) they're a great price compared to tubes of paint.

The wooden plaques themselves I buy from ebay. Depending on how many you want and the size you want to work with I recommend contacting a few different sellers to see what they can offer you in terms of discounts and combined postage. 

I'm always trying new techniques and will gradually blog the different methods I use with mini tutorials and information on which materials I use and where I have found them from. In the mean time, here's a few pics from my earliest attempts at plaque making:

I learnt whilst making this plaque that you should lightly sand
acrylic paint where you intend to glue and embellishment
otherwise it wont stick as well. Love the sign, hate the writing.

I wish I had done the writing in white for this one. Love the
pink colour. Think the writing looks a little lost - a smaller
plaque probably would've been better. I like the handwriting
for 'smile' but then it went all horrible! :o)

I actually really like this one for some reason.
It is very basic in terms of skills, but there is something about
it that catches my eye.

My first ever craft fair