I wanted to paint a vintage-style Santa since Christmas 2021. I looked through the Douglas Fir designs and I liked them well enough, but when I came across this 1960 Popular Mechanics Lawn Santa, the design was perfect and so was the price: Free on Google books. You will have to paint these designs yourself, as opposed to pasting on a printed sheet of paper.

There are 16 pages full of Christmas DIY projects, including the as-large-as-you-want Santa Claus cutout. You can view all 16 pages and more here: Popular Mechanics 1960 Lawn Christmas Santa.

If this were 1960, I could send in 50 cents and get a large print to paste onto your wood. Since it’s 2022, I figured I’d probably better keep my 50 cents and enlarge the image in Photoshop, and use an inexpensive projector to display my image for painting. As you can see, you can also go old school and simply transfer St. Nick with a grid system.

Here’s a few of my waving vintage Santa Claus in progress, and a completed!

Painting Santa. I used a 4×8 sheet of plywood, and made him 6 feet tall.

Cutting Santa out with a jigsaw. I hope you enjoy sawdust.

Santa is sealed and painted and displayed with a spotlight! I think he’s perfect at six feet tall, and I’ve already gotten compliments on how he looks.

There’s another great resource I wanted to point to that has even more vintage Popular Mechanics Christmas links, Family Christmas Online.