Good Business, Great Art

In March of 2006, Schenectady, NY-based Ray Sign received a call from NYC-based Edelman Leather, which tans leather for upholstery and architectural applications, to develop a window sign from sheet aluminum and neon. Shop owner Russ Hazen and his staff didn’t think the sign would yield an unusual project. However, when Arthur Edelman, the store’s co-proprietor, visited Ray and presented the design, they knew the job would reprise an interesting snippet of art history.

"Arthur wanted us to recreate a design that Andy Warhol had developed for them in 1959, before he gained the status of cultural icon," Tim Prescott, Ray’s sales manager, said. "We hand-rendered sketches and scanned them into vector art using CorelDraw® and PhotoShop®."

Using the scans, Ray Sign output the image as a 4 x 9-ft. print, which it output on an Avery Dennison Graphics & Reflective Products Div. cast film with its Mimaki USA JV5-130S with solvent ink and coated with a gloss overlaminate. The shop affixed the print to a .063-in. aluminum cabinet and sheathed it with Plexiglas® acrylic sheet.

Against this backdrop, the shop fashioned 8- and 10mm neon tubing with a brilliant color array: EGL Co. Inc. (Newark, NJ) bromo blue, red, green, horizon blue, yellow and incandescent white (EGL custom-fabricated the latter). Stephen Gabree bent the neon and Craig Most handled fabrication and assembly. To minimize its weight, they opted for nine, |2203| electronic power supplies instead of a traditional, magnetic model.

Prescott said, "We enjoyed this job because custom-neon projects are rare, and it was especially enjoyable to create a sign based on the design of a legend such as Andy Warhol."

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The first sign is scheduled to be installed in Edelman’s Gotham location later this month. Subsequently, Ray will produce sign for the company’s seven other nationwide locations.