In spring 2024 after wrapping up my wintertime adventure of placing staked-signs all around Lancaster County, PA, I decided to change my methodology of concealing paintings. My new technique consisted of two different styles for guerilla art paintings: hanging signs and fixed signs. The former contain small plant-hanger chains fixed to the corners to dangle from surfaces, and the latter are diamond-shaped and are fixed to sign posts with metal bolts. In addition, I’ve mostly retired the papercraft technique as it was too cumbersome, and instead I honed my skills with stenciling.

My first wave of stencils were made of mylar (thin plastic) and made by a store on Etsy that does custom stenciling. I used these stencils for making dozens of initial paintings with mixed success, as I had to figure out a method of clamping the thin, flimsy stencils onto the boards. Another issue was the cleanup: normally I use acetone for removing acrylic paint, which however cannot be used on plastic surfaces as it dissolves polymer materials. The mylar stencils only had two layers: the yellow minifigure body and the black outlines. Therefore these first batch of paintings had less detail for the completed minifigures, and significantly less detail than the papercraft staked signs.

Diamond-shaped signs made with the mylar stencils, which only have two colors.

After completing a little over a dozen hanging signs and a small amount of fixed signs, I traveled around Central Pennsylvania yet again this time in summer 2024 to place them in similar locations as before: mostly under covered bridges, but I also fixed the diamond signs to random sign posts. Initially I didn’t want to infuriate PennDOT by interfering with important road signs (see my disclaimer about non-destructive street art), so I tried to strategically seek out empty sign posts that had their signs already missing. Sometimes whilst driving through Lancaster, I would occasionally stumble upon an empty sign post along the road: these are the type of posts I specifically had in mind, so that I would not interfere with preexisting signs.

By the end of the summer I created a brand new stencil concept by having multiple layers of stencils, in addition to having two different shape orientations for square-shaped or diamond-shaped. With a total of 10 new stencils – five for square and five for diamond – here is the layout of layers, each on a 12”x12” square of metal:

Layer 1: white base/primer
Layer 2: yellow body
Layer 3: dark shadows (initially intended to be orange, but I liked fluorescent pink better)
Layer 4: white highlights
Layer 5: black outlines

Mockup of how each stenciled painting was intended to look, using my actual artwork files in Adobe Illustrator.

I shopped around numerous places online to get good deals for metal laser-cut stencils, but sadly the prices were way too high. Some places quoted around $120 for a single stencil sheet. I tried using the website SendcutSend.com, but although their rates are affordable, their services can only cut continuous laser designs, and not designs which have multiple cuts on the sheet. In other words, they could cut layers 1 and 2 as they’re simply basic contours of the minifig, but could not cut the additional detailed stencil layers. Ultimately I found an affordable laser cutting service on Etsy located overseas; they quoted me at $20 per stencil for stainless steel and $17 for regular steel. I made an order for the 10 layers on regular steel, to see the quality and try them out before moving up to stainless steel.

The new steel stencils took about two weeks to produce and ship, which were sent to my friend’s house when I was on vacation in Pennsylvania in September 2024. I immediately tested out each layer to create a completed a minifigure painting with acrylic spray paint, but noticed some errors during my process: when moving from layer 2 to 3, the shadow colors seemed a bit off by a centimeter or so. When I tried layer 4 for the white highlights, I realized they were way off – almost by an entire inch. That was when I realized that layers 3 and 4 weren’t cut properly by the laser cutting service. My original digital art files were specifically set up to have each of the stencil layers align perfectly on a 12”x12” canvas, so that as long as the square stencils are placed corner to corner on each wood board, the artwork should theoretically align perfectly.

After much frustration, I had to paint over the misaligned paintings, and instead redo them with layer 4 omitted and with layer 3 manually moved out of line to make the colors match with the previous layer. It’s because of this reason is why none of my paintings from this series contain the white highlights layer, and in about half of the instances the orange or pink shadows look off. The white base, the yellow body, and the black outlines were able to sync up mostly accurately.

Two examples of diamond-shaped signs with the new steel stencils. Notice how the layer for orange shadows is way out of alignment.

In this series I created about 20 diamond road signs and and maybe five or six hanging signs – since I wanted to place the paintings on road signs more blatantly open to the public rather than concealing them underneath bridges. Also aside from my paint pour techniques, I also did a few miscellaneous painted boards by experimenting with masking tape to mimic the appearance of Eddie Van Halen’s iconic Frankenstrat guitar. This method had mixed success and required lots of trial and error, so I only made about four paintings in this style.

Also to prevent weather damage since these fixed sign paintings were intended to be outdoors for long periods of time, I coated them with multiple layers of Minwax Spar Urethane. By the time the paintings were all dried with the holes drilled, I went on my journey to hang up these signs!

The actual journey was rather uneventful and wasn’t as memorable as my winter adventure in the previous months. Nonetheless I completed the journey with few obstacles. For hardware I purchased tons of stainless steel and zinc bolts, nuts, and washers from Lowe’s and Home Depot. Each diamond-shaped painting specifically had their corner holes drilled accurately to match the holes of road signs: exactly 40.5cm from corner to corner. I would use #8 2.5” machine screws to attach them to the posts, although I upgraded to 3” screws which have me more slack to add the nuts and washers.

I placed at least one sign in each of the boroughs of Hempfield, as that’s the school district where I graduated in 2003. Some boroughs had multiple signs placed depending on availability. In this round of minifigure painting signs, I placed signs in East Petersburg [where I grew up], Mountville [where my best friends and former girlfriend lived], Landisville [where my high school is located], Centerville [where my middle school is located], Columbia [where some of my friends were from], Farmdale [where some other friends lived], and finally Rohrerstown – which is, uh, a place. It’s definitely a place. Other signs were placed in New Holland, Lititz, Quarryville, Ronks, and on Lincoln Highway. We also had a terrible thunderstorm on the night where I put up most of these signs which hampered my mission a bit. I drove all around Lancaster in my new Toyota SUV, rocking out to ’90s music and eating Taco Bell – waiting for the rain to subside.

Sign found in Landisvlle, PA, discovered by a follower on Facebook.