Velvet soap was launched as a brand in 1906 by John Ambrose Kitchen, an English entrepreneur who migrated with his three young sons to Australia from Reading in 1854.
Kitchen commenced making tallow candles from a rented premesis in South Melbourne (then known as Emerald Hill) and later moved to a large factory on 117 acres in Port Melbourne, adding soap, soda crystals, baking powder and glycerine to the product line, with the most popular products being Velet Soap and Electrine Candles.
The Kitchen family business merged with the British firm of Lever Bros in 1914. Hand painted Velvet advertising signs were common on the sides of shops all across Australia, as were baked enamel signs.
There are a few minor variations of the basic Velvet Soap logo design, but as far as I can tell, this is the most common format and colour scheme, although some similar to this scheme have a drop shadow on the large letters. For hand painted signs on buildings, the proportions sometimes varied, depending on how the signwriter could make the logo fit in the available space. Tinkering with a logo would not happen in this age of the ‘corporate identity’.
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I made my reproduction on a piece of 1200 x 500mm sheet metal which I sprayed white. I used a combination of masking and spray cans for the red and blue, and painted the yellow border with a brush.
The first step was to draw the artwork in Adobe Illustrator, using photographs for reference. The idea was to use the AI file to laser-cut the lettering from 3mm thick MDF to use as an inverse stencil for spray painting, and also to use the file for reference to draw the cross onto the sheet metal with pencil, hence the coordinates in mm at each vertex.
Tracing the lettering onto the sheet metal. The 3mm thick MDF laser-cut letters will also be used for masking when spray painting the blue cross background, to leave white lettering behind. Drawing the letters onto the sheet metal with pencil serves as guidelines for placing the MDF letters prior to the painting stage.
The MDF letters won’t be stuck down – I was hoping that their weight would ensure that they wouldn’t be blown away by the paint spray. As it turned out, this worked well, except that the sheet metal sagged slightly at the sides (I should have supported it better!) and some paint spray got underneath the MDF, creating a slightly blurring of the outside edge parts of the large white V and T lettering.
Masking around the white border of the cross for the red background, using Yellow Frog Tape, which is designed for masking delicate surfaces – when removed, it is less likely to pull off underlying paint than Green Frog Tape or regular masking tape. The inside of the cross (which was to be the white border and blue area) was further masked off with scrap paper.
Red background, with the masking tape and paper removed.
Masking for the blue cross and its white border, with the MDF laser-cut letters positioned to act as an inverse stencil. Since the MDF letters had to be removed following spraying of the blue paint, they weren’t stuck down, so I had to be careful not to bump anything!
The result, with a few MDF letters removed.
Now it just needs a yellow border.
More masking, for applying the yellow paint with a brush…
…leaves the completed sign!