I found a way to combine my passions for painting, typography, woodworking, photography and artisanal commerce.
I've been working in Commercial Art and Media for about 35 years, and making art since I was old enough to hold a crayon. I studied illustration and graphic design, then worked in that field until the early days of Computer Animation, which lured me away from traditional media and into the digital world. I've worked in television, film and interactive for the past 25 years or so, but I always missed the joy of working with tactile materials such as paint, wood and hand tools.
My wife and I bugged out of dot-com-crazy San Francisco at the turn of the Millennium and moved to Upstate New York, with hopes of returning to our artistic roots and simplifying our lives. We bought a couple of amazing Victorian buildings that needed some serious help and toiled for 13 years to restore them, while continuing to work in commercial art. Now the buildings are done, we're set up in our studios and working at what we love.
We started selling vintage items a few years ago on BingoBox, our first Etsy shop. We enjoyed that so much, we opened a second shop called BingoBits, which offers surplus and salvage. Then Niki started making beautiful paper goods and created PaperAltar. After reading an Etsy blog about the re-emergence of traditional sign painting, and watching the trailer for the Sign Painters documentary, I remembered how much I enjoyed painting signs. So I bought a fresh batch of One Shot lettering enamel and got busy. The result is ReinSign, and I hope you enjoy my work.