Written by Scott

For years, Angie has used a custom display board that I built for her for live events. Before this display board, she was constantly interrupted from her drawing and attention to her subject by random people asking her for how long she’s drawing.

She also wanted to make a display sign that was customizable for that specific job, not only with the hours she’ll be drawing, but the company or event name, as well as be artistic.

For awhile, Angie printed signs before each job. This was nice, but often she is asked to stay overtime and she would have to cross out the hours to make the change.

We both thought that a dry erase marker board would be the perfect solution. We chose black for its artistic value… it would basically make the sign invisible and draw less attention to itself, and instead focus the attention on the neon colored markers instead.

We also wanted to feature Angie’s artwork on the sign. However, we wanted to be able to update these pictures as often as possible. Like most artists, she likes having more recent artwork representing her.

In fact, many artists loved what we created so much that they asked us for one. So I built several of these display boards for Angie’s good friends.

You can see the one we gave Emily Anthony here and here as a gift. Emily even started using a digital picture frame like we discussed in an article we wrote last year.

We also gave one as a gift to Pat Harrington, another Philadelphia artist who works with Angie quite often.

Creating the Custom Display Board
So below is the display board that we created. The entire display board is built onto a piece of wood 24″ wide by 16″ high and painted matte black.

The Plexiglass Frame
The left hand side has four pieces of wood (1/8″ strips that are 1 1/5″ wide) that run the border of the frame. All four pieces are attached via Velcro. This makes it very easy and quick to change the paper display under the Plexiglass.

The Marker Board
The right hand side of the display board is a piece of black dry erase marker board that has been cut to 11″ by 16″. It is also attached to the back board using Velcro.

This way, in case the marker board were to get scratched or crack, it can be replaced very easily.

You can see how these are very modular and can be adapted for many situations.

And most importantly, it adds to your professional image when you are at a live event drawing. As we’ve mentioned in other articles, branding and marketing are important. This board is a perfect step to building and maintaining your brand.

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