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Decals made with inkjet printer too light


Hawkgrove

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I've returned to modeling and have made some custom decals on clear inkjet decal paper purchased from Hobby Lobby.  It's the same size as the old Testors paper they carried, 8.5x5.5.  Once made I seal them with clear acrylic spray fixative.  Its worked okay for some smaller decals like instrument panels and most recently I made black U.S. ARMY letters for under the wings of a B-24.  They look pretty good on the neutral gray.  I then tried to make the yellow serial numbers for the tail and large yellow numerals for the side.  They look perfect on the decal sheet with the white background but once I put them on the olive upper surface of the model they basically disappear.  They almost look opaque. 

Question, am I doing something wrong, is the inkjet paper not correct for what I'm doing?  If I use white paper I would have to trim the letter precisely and the numerals on the tail are about 2/16 high.  Do I need to find a color laser printer instead, would that be a darker ink?  I had to buy some Techmod yellow letter decals and they work great but I've planned to make some nose art with yellow in it for another project.  Suggestions?

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It's a common problem for bright colors. Do some test runs with normal paper where you print the same thing twice, it would double the ink quantity on the paper, making it less translucent. It works fine if the printer's mechanisms are in good condition so that it prints in the same spot AND it doesn't smudge.

 

Edit: if you're not doing it already set the printer to photo/best quality.

Edited by bmwh548
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You're not doing anything wrong, simply you have met one of the limitations of home made decals: since home printer inks and toners are designed to be used over a white surface, all colours except black do not have enough pigment to cover properly over dark colours. This is true for most inks, not only the ones in our printers, so much that even commercial decals have a white background printed before everything else so that the following light colours will look good on top of it

 

What can you do ? Very little I'm afraid.... yes you can use more than one set one above the other, but it will do little. The best way to go is to have something white under your decals.

There are on the market white decal papers, on these your yellow artwork will look good however you then have to cut the decal as close as possible to your artwork, as the rest of the white decal will be visible. One way to sort the problem is to add an edge in the colour of the underlying camouflage so that you'll not have to cut too cloe to the artwork. Of course cutting the decal may result in some water ingressing, with risk of smears.

Alternatively you can leave a small white surround and then blend this with the underlying camouflage with a small brush... and of course you can use a combination of the two techniques.

An alternative is to paint the area white and then mask before painting the camo. The mask will have to fit the artwork of course but in any case if the difference is small you can again blend everything in with a small brush.

As you see it's not going to be an easy job. In any case the satisfaction of having a unique model of your favourite subject should more than compensate the effort needed to get a decent result

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Thank you both for your help and suggestions. Before retiring last year we had a large color laser printer at my workplace.  The color from that always appeared sharper and more vivid than on my home inkjet. I know they make decal paper for laser printers, would those images have more color and be less transparent or is having the white undercoating the key to my issue?  Thanks again for sharing your experience. 

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On 3/31/2022 at 3:28 PM, Hawkgrove said:

Thank you both for your help and suggestions. Before retiring last year we had a large color laser printer at my workplace.  The color from that always appeared sharper and more vivid than on my home inkjet. I know they make decal paper for laser printers, would those images have more color and be less transparent or is having the white undercoating the key to my issue?  Thanks again for sharing your experience. 

 

Really will depend on the printer and the kind of toner: my Epson prints all colours except black too light to seriously work on dark colours, while of course working perfectly on white. It may be that some higher end laser printers work better, but I wouldn't bet on it, unless they are specifically designed to work on dark materials. Where a laser printer has a clear advantage is in the lack of any need to spray a protective coat.. that mind, can always be useful to make the decal more robust (laser printed decals can scratch easily) but is not necessary as toner will not be attacked by water

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  • 2 months later...

Inkjet inks are transparent. They rely on whiteness of the paper to bring the color. Since you are printing them on an effectively transparent foil you are missing white background.

 

Solutions; Use them on white background or use the white decal sheet which basically is an non transparent white foil.

You will need to cut them very carefully to shape, which may be similar in difficulty of preparing a white spray 'mask' for under the decal.

 

Some foil cutting machine helps there.

 

Another solution is to use third party white toner on some laser printers and print white, but it is costly.

 

I pondered tampography too but all of those are way too costly for decals.

 

For now I just buy third party decals or make stencil masks for spraying, like german letters and signs, either made by my foil cutter or use pre-purchased photo etched ones.

Edited by Casey
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  • 9 months later...

You're not doing anything wrong. If you place the decals on a white surface they will be fine, but on a coloured/darker surface you probably won't see them at all. One work around is to print them onto white paper but you need to put a background of your chosen colour around them. For example, I made some Yamaha decals for a motorcycle project. They were white letters and they were going onto a red bodywork. I used white paper and printed a border of red around the white Yamaha letters. I then cut around the Yamaha leaving a tiny edge of the red I'd printed, as close a cut as I could do. Once applied to the red bodywork you could not see the red edge and I was left with a near perfect white Yamaha logo.

 

IMGP8291.jpg

 

 

Edited by Steve Noble
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