Graphics - Part 1
With the plastic finished I turned my attention to the artwork. It was pretty easy to take a picture with it on top of a grid and using the grid, get it sized correctly, then extend the corner out to where it ought to beextending the artwork
.
A problem I discovered was that the original piece had deep scratches in it. The scratches messed up the scan and would have been very visible in the final productvisible scratches
.
So I spent some time cleaning up the artwork, not perfect but it should be adequatecloseup of originalafter cleanup
.
With the artwork ready to go, it was time for the most difficult part of it, trying to match the colors - its tricky because part of it depends on how it was scanned and part on how my particular printer does the color. Here is the first pass without any correction, you can see the colors and brightness are way offmatching the colors
.
After several passes I had a close match, then it was time to print onto the decal paper. I purchased a set of "Laser Waterslide Clear Paper" so I could essentuially make the image a big decal I could slide onto the plastic.
Naturally the graphic would not fit on a 8.5x11 decal sheet, so I cut it in half at the thinnest point and printed the two halves out. Thats when I discovered my laser printer doesn't seem to like this paper. It leaves a ghost print that ruins the image...sigh. You can see how the red ghosts down into the yellow in the top graphic.the colors run
.
Fortunately I noticed that the colors seem to bleed after a couple of inches, so I turned the image 90 degrees and let the bleed happen out into the empty space, at least I had a usable image!
a usable image
.
With anticipation I cut out the bottom half decal and put it into the waterthe decal is softening in the water
.
and successfully got it onto the plastic. It doesn't look very good though as I forgot about a critical thing, there is no "white" in laser decals, it leaves them clear! You can see in the pic that the cream-tint is there and the white of the magazine is colored as it goes through the decal but I need the white to be there as well.
the decal has no white background
.
So I ripped it off and now I have to figure out if there is some way to print the white so that it will actually show up on the decal or if I should abandon the decal approach and go with a stick-on paper approach. I think there is "white" decal paper (rather than clear) but I have also read threads where people argue to use paper rather than decals.