Home made decals

[Bri]

Klear's no good on inkjet, there's too much water in it and it reactivates the ink.
Wolfie (next entry up) has used Ownbrand Ltd acrylic spray (in an aerosol can) and I've been using the recommended Halford's ditto. Both seem to work, but:
1. Give your finished artwork lots of time to dry - a good week in the airing cupboard, and/or several sessions with a hairdryer
2. Give 2 or 3 mist coats of the acrylic spray. Make sure the can's warmish - airing cupboard again. (This ups the spray pressure, reduces the fluid viscosity, and gives a finer spray.)

My efforts to date have been disappointing for another reason - my grotty old 300 dpi printer. Now I find that my spouse's kit will do up to 2400 dpi and the improvement is astounding.

Best of luck - Bri.

[Lonewolf]

After some trial and error, I have perfected the technique.

HOWEVER IT ONLY WORKS FOR SOMETHING DARK ON A LIGHT BACKGROUND.

Print off on normal A4 paper till you have it right, and use up as much of the paper as poss or else you are wasting it. Once satisfied, print of on decal paper using your printer's high quality settings. Then spray with acrylic aerosol. NOT KLEER, I also have had trouble with this. Cut out and apply as usual.

I did THESE using Photoshop and my home printer.

[Bri]

You don't need to waste any of your decal paper!

Set up your printer to put your subject near the top of a page and (having got your colours right) print it on heavy plain paper, which can be second hand - and not even a full sheet if the subject's near the top. You can even print it "draft" - it's only for positioning.
Cut a piece of decal paper to cover your subject plus a bit of overlap. Hold it still and cut round it with a scalpel. Put the decal paper in the hole and tape the back.
Put it through the printer again, this time on "best" or whatever. (I tell my printer it's a transparency and use "normal" but it depends on your hardware.)
Dry it, spray it, and peel the tape off before you cut anything out.

I've had limited but encouraging success printing yellow over olive drab on white decal paper. It's a huge pain matching the background colour, but even if it can't be done exactly it makes overpainting much easier.

I think we're getting there between us --- keep it up, chaps! Bri.

[robdebie]

So far no-one mentioned the Alps printer option. You don't need to own one of these to create your own custom decals - there are plenty of custom printers who will do the printing for you. The quality is really good, and the printer can do white, which is an important color in itself, and makes for color decals that are opaque.

It's not hugely expensive to have a sheet printed, the best I've seen is 33$ for an A4 sheet with white and color decals. But I think this price only applies when you provide ready-to-print artwork, which is very reasonable considering how much time goes into the artwork.

I have a webpage about (mainly) the design part: "Design your own Alps / OKI custom decals" at:

www.xs4all.nl/~robdebie/models/decals.htm

The page contains a list of 30+ custom printers.

Rob

[johnr]

With regard to sealing I use Microscale Liquid Decal film. I use a hair drier to dry the inkjet output, give a couple of coats of decal film and dry with hair drier if necessary and away you go.

[kitspackman]

I've been doing a lot of this recently, printing my own decals I mean, and I found the Crafty paper very good. The only problem is they are out of white background paper at the moment so all mine have been done on clear stuff.

This causes a problem when the graphics have white sections in them as they print clear and you end up seeing the backing paint through the decal. So I took a sheet of Crafty paper and sprayed it with Halfords Appliance White, then applied the colour decals onto the white painted paper. After they had dried out I cut round them and put them on the model.

There is a tendancy for the colour decals to lift off the white while cutting out, but it can be done with care. The decal ends up rather thicker than I'd like but there's not a lot I can do about it until Crafty get their white stuff back in stock.

I found that Kleer works just fine over this stuff, so long as Crafty's acrylic sealing spray is used over the decal sheet as they recommend. It also tends to smooth off the step where the over-thick decal is applied, which is handy.

I found the Lazertran stuff useless for my purposes, sad to say. As mentioned earlier the background areas go white when they've dried out, but when you Kleer varnish them they go transparent again! The more coats of Kleer you use the more permanent this transparency gets, so for airliner use, my main modelling area, it's not really a starter.

For graphics software I use PaintShoPro, the earlier versions of which are freeware by now, if you can find them. Currently I use V 4.0 for general use and V 7.0 (payware) for layered schemes. My printer is an HP OfficeJet 6310 all-in-one if that's of any relevance.