When Rod Busch sees what people have done to the Coalition for Marriage billboards around Hobart, he feels a sense of disappointment.
It's not that he has much of an opinion on the same-sex marriage debate — it's that he knows the skill that went into making the sign.
"I get disappointed when you see big signs that have been vandalised," he told Leon Compton on ABC Radio Hobart.
"People don't appreciate the skill that's gone into it ... it really is a craft and it is a way of life."
Mr Busch is one of a small number of signwriters who still paints by hand, using a resting stick to paint straight onto windows, billboards and anywhere a sign is needed.
"You really have to love doing the job," he said.
"The best thing about that is when you're working outside, people come to you and talk to you. They think it's a trade that's gone."
He went into signwriting in 1966 after leaving school at the end of grade eight and not knowing what to do.
Although he has spent the past 50 years working with words, he struggled at school and later found out it was because of his dyslexia.
"At school you were told you were dumb if you couldn't read properly," he said.
"It really affected you at that stage."
But signwriting was on a list of jobs he could apply for and he won a five-year on-the-job apprenticeship with Don Prairie.
"[It was] three years of doing nothing but writing the alphabet out, learning how to set out the words."
Because signwriting is about working on a word letter by letter, his dyslexia was not a big issue.
When Mr Busch started in the industry he was part of a team of brushwork signwriters who painted billboards, shopfront notices, banners — anything and everything asked of them.
And while electronics have taken over many of the hand-painting jobs, Mr Busch still has plenty to do.
He particularly likes working on honour boards using paint and gold leaf, which he says "really test you".
"You've got the same person who wrote that for a while and then another person writes it, so you can see the difference in the hand style," he said.
The biggest gold leaf project Mr Busch worked on was a large wall at Hobart's Museum of Old and New Art (MONA).
"We had two walls that were 22 metres long and three metres high and they were covered in gold leaf … there were 7,000 individual pieces of gold," he said.
While his son now runs the business, Mr Busch has no intention of putting down his brush.
"I enjoy it. I would do it every day," he said.
"I go to work every morning at 7:30 and just enjoy the whole day."
