Designing Decals

[jaffro]

I am currently working on a model that is white and therefore required me to paint it. I want to add some lettering, logo's and a few other details using stickers or decals after painting the model.

I am perfectly comfortable designing the decals/stickers and I already have some inkjet printable sticker sheets and some sealant to spray them with once printed... I really just have one thing left to figure out and that's how to design my sticker sheet so that the decals/stickers come out the size I want.

I can't help thinking it's something simple, and I have a couple of options when it comes to graphic software (fairly recent paintshop pro and a rather old photoshop).

I was going to just start throwing stuff on an A4 sized document/picture and printing test pages to get them right under different zooms/scales whatever but can't help wondering if there's a simple way to do this I'm not aware of and would appreciate any help you can offer. I've searched the forums and found plenty of threads talking about application and printing of decals, but not much on the actual design...

[HMCS]

Not too familiar with paintshop pro,.. I would double check to see if you can measure accurately like in either illustrator or photoshop,.. one mistake people make is resizing elements in raster based software for example,.. making an object smaller, then deciding it was the wrong size only to enlarge that element to final size,... that is a recipe for soft pixely graphics,.. if you do that,.. re import your original large graphic then resize it to that pixely final one to maintain sharpness (and of course deleting the crappy one)
rule of thumb: upscaling bad, down scaling good,.. (depending on the dpi of the original that is,.. thats a whole other discussion)

My best recommendation would be to create your decals in a vector based software,.. dont worry about the version, they all do the same in regards to the basic stuff plus its scale-able which now opens your world to reaching more people or more models,..

also check out online there are some places that will print your decals for cheap and professional,.. also these places have the option/capability of printing white letters etc which look great on models,.. ex: white lettering/stencils in WWII cockpits or on dark fuselages ( I will find you the link to a great place and post later)

I wouldnt bother testing on decal paper so you dont waste that stuff,.. printing on white decal weirds me out too, because for me seeing a white sliver next to a colored graphic makes it look like a sticker, diminishing the final result

hope this helps,.. basing your decals off of 3-view drawings and great photo reference then scaling that to your models size is a good what to start too (this is where vector based graphics come in),.. just my 2 cents