Creating your own decals

[PhantomBigStu]

Probably been asked a million times but how does one go about it? Aside from the obvious of having a high quality printer and the right paper for the job. Come to the realisation that many of the schemes I want to do in the future are not available in the market

[Pin]

This is too big a question to be answered in one line. Can you provide an example of what do you want to achieve?

By all means you will need at least some skills in vector design i.e. Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw or alike. Commercial packages are far from being cheap, free software exists but far from perfect

[Foghorn Leghorn]

Time, knowledge, software skills/exp and equipment are needed. Black and white is fairly easy but colour is a whole different ball game. If you want the odd decal sheet it may work out cheaper to go here (at BM):

http://www.britmodeller.com/forums/index.php?/forum/131-parkes682decals/

But as Pin says it's a huge subject. Vector images are the way to go, Inkscape is free software but not without its pitfalls

Neil

Edited February 8, 2015 by Foghorn Leghorn

[Giorgio N]

First of all I'd suggest a search here for the many threads on this subject, they may answer at least some of your questions.

In any case you've already identified an important aspect: having the right materials.

As said above, a good software is extremely important, although many achieve good results with less specialized tools. Inkscape is not bad imho, at least to get started. Other options are clearly better but not cheap.

It's also very important to understand the limitations of this process, in order to better plan how every marking is better approached. This is particularly important for markings requiring light colors on dark backgrounds.

Last but not least: give it a go! And don't let the first failures kill your enthusiasm. Be patient, keep trying and you'll find all the solutions that work best for you. And don't hesitate to ask any question you may have on any specific aspect

[PhantomBigStu]

I was thinking along the lines of printing my own squadrons codes, serials and if necessary the odd little badge, but I release the first 2 there's generic stuff like that on the market for stuff like raf ww2

[Giorgio N]

WW2 raf squadron codes are not easy for one simple reason: Often these are in light colors over dark backgrounds. Think sky or medium sea grey over the standard camo of the time, or the red on black of bombers. The inks and toners used by home printers are not opaque enough to cover well over a dark background. Any decal of this type would require a white background. You could have a professional printer to print this for your decals or cut the background from white decal paper. However if you can cut the background, you could cut the codes from a paper sheet of the right color..

Black codes or serials on the other hand can be printed and applied easily over every background.

Small badges can be printed on white decal paper, if needed with a small outline in the camouflage color..

[Raven Morpheus]

If you want to print light colours you'll need white decal paper, an alps printer, or do them by screen printing.

I recently printed my own decals for a 1/48 UH-1, by scanning in and downsizing some Academy 1/35 174th AHC decals (from their UH-1 Frog kit). It went reasonably well, until I realised I had printed the red "danger" and yellow number tail decals on clear decal paper, and they're very translucent.

Thing is with white decal paper you either have to match the background colour of paint around the edge of your decal (which is almost impossible), cut very finely around (and inside if your doing numbers/letters) your decal (again very difficult if not damn near impossible for some decals), or paint the background colour in (again a hassle).

Unless you're doing something that has a white outline using white decal paper is a PITA.

Alps printers are hard to come by and/or very expensive.

Screen printing is probably not an easy way to go either.

The easy part is the artwork itself - just get Photoshop, or Gimp, or other similar software (Gimp is as good as photochop but free btw) and have a play.

Sealing the decals can be done by many ways, I have tried spraying Klear over them and that worked OK, but I recently decided to buy some proper spray (Keen top crystal clear) and that seemed to work better.

I could do black decals all day long though, they're easy. It's just colours that can be a problem. And I've read this is a common problem, so it's not just my cheap £50 HP inkjet at fault.

[Giorgio N]

Another problem of printing on white decal paper is that often cutting around the artwork results in jagged edges on the artwork. For this reason, I prefer to print the outline of the white background only and use this to cut the background from white paper. The artwork is then printed on clear paper. This technique requires two decals one over the other. However good quality decal paper is quite thin and even with two layers the overall thickness of the decal is acceptable.

[PhantomBigStu]

cheers for the comments, does sound like its a rather complicated affair, ironically just discovered xtradecal are releasing next month what I wanted to create most, and do sheets of RAF codes and serials so may well not need to create my own decals at all do to the schemes I'm planning