How I made my wrestling sign for WWE Crown Jewel Perth

A few weeks ago, I flew on a nine hour flight from Auckland, New Zealand to Perth, Australia to attend WWE's Crown Jewel weekend.

These shows are televised and the tickets I got had a very good chance of ending up in at least a few shots so I figured for my first, and possibly last¹ show, I should go the extra mile and put together a wrestling sign.

I didn't have any special knowledge and I mostly went back and forth with Claude on what would consitute a good sign.

That gave me a rough idea of what things might make sense and then queried with a local art supply store who echoed similar suggestions.

Most of what I ended up purchasing was a bit overkill as I thought I'd essentially do a stencil approach but it was taking way too long, and would probably fall apart so I ended up just opting for using plain permanent markers on card.

With all that out of the way, here's what my final design ended up looking like:

The card stock is Prisma 50x70 and lime green is pretty prevalent in wrestling recordings for a good reason: It contrasts really well in arenas which can be relatively dark at times.

For the black lettering, I used a bunch of Artline 70 permanent markers from Woolworths as I hadn't originally intended to use marker for lettering, as mentioned before.

The white outline was planned in advance though and for that, I used a white Posca PC-7M Broad Tip marker, which took a few passes to come out consistently.

In order to get the lettering relatively nice, I first used pencil to sketch out the letters, redoing them a few times to get the shapes relatively consistent.

I'm not artist and I probably spent a good hour or two, with the whole sign making process taking like 3 hours, including the rethink and trip to Woolworths to get more supplies.

I used a ruler to roughly sketch out boxes for each letter to make them mostly aligned but otherwise the actual shape of the letters was just free-hand and praying a bit.

In the end, I liked how it came out! I do think the "Up" part could have been strengthened since it's a little hard to read on TV but the rest of it is pretty legible and I thought it was a good swerve for people who might glance and think it was a Randy Orton sign at first.

Overall, I wouldn't change very much about the process and I'd probably opt for the same process however I would go for a slightly smaller card.

The card that I got was about my arm span so it was a bit clumsy to fold and unfold, and definitely required two hands.

One size smaller would have been perfect and much easier to hold up in a pinch without blocking other people's views as much.

¶ Footnotes

1. With ticket prices raising as high as they are, perhaps no one will be able to afford decent seats in the very near future. ↩