The issue is how to make light colors (e.g. “Gold”) opaque enough to show on a dark background (e.g. Floquil Dark Blue). Here’s the background -
Making your own decals seems to be all the rage, and since my Dell A960 printer on “Best” makes nice clear, sharp lettering, I decided to give it a try. Microsoft “Gold” color seems to be a reasonable approximation for Dulux, so I made a sheet of lettering for my passenger cars. Everything seemed to be going ok until I began to apply the first one to my dark blue number- and letterboards, whereupon the character disappeared. The gold color was not opaque enough to show on the dark blue background. (And yes, I used “inkjet” paper!)
Surely I’m not the first person to run into this issue. I’ve posted on a Dell printer forum asking if there are software tricks or downloads to allow multiple overprinting, but perhaps some model railroader already knows the answer!
Don’t know of you were using “white” or “clear” decals. This is where you may need to put down a layer of white under the color. AFAIK nobody makes white ink, not for inkjet. I asked Kodak about their new printers. Unfortunately, they don’t print white either.
You could try an experiment to print the gold letters on a white paper, then add blue around the lettering?? THis is similar to the old technique of painting building signs with 3 coats of paint. The bottom coat is a primer. The second coat may be white. Then you put dry transfer letters over the white. Paint a 3rd color. Carefully remove the dry transfer stencil. You may still have to touch up the white letters. There’s too many letters in a roadname to do this for passenger cars!
Don’t know your scale or your roadname. This may be one time the decal makers still have inkjets beat.
Something to consider color with white pigment will not come thru on clear decal paper,you must use white decal paper,when using the white decal paper try to get a color as close to your model your are decaling use this color as a background then add your stripe color over this. Another option would be to use pinstripping tape it comes in a variety of colors.
Some of you are not reading the question. He is trying to make gold lettering for passenger cars. If he had a printer that would do white, he could make white and superimpose the gold over the white. But he can’t print white! One thing to try is make two sets and lay one on top of the other. Even regular decals sometimes require this because of a dark background. He is not doing stripes or white lettering.
Probably best to go to a commercial decal printer and have some proper ones made. Inkjet decals are for very few applications such as dark printing on lighter colors. I’ve made some in black for a yellow model, worked out OK. Printing “gold” lettering if possible, wil be quite a problem of opacity.
Hehehe…this is an age-old problem! The thing is, metalic colors like gold and siler and even some light colors is impossible to duplicate with ‘personal’ printers is because they can only print ‘illusions’ of those colors rather than the ‘real’ color. If you want gold, you gonna have to get gold leaf metallic sheets and then photo-copy or ‘laser print’ the background colors.
Most printers emulate gold by printing faint yellow and with white background, it sppears gold in colour. In fact, the lighter the colour, the printer simply use less ink and hence more ‘faint’. The only type of printer that can print ‘solid’ colors are Xerox Colour Laser using solid ‘wax stick’ or you can try colour laser but most of them are still using the ‘emulation’ printing method unless you go for commercial screen printing using special ‘gold leaf’ ink. That’s why anything with mettalic colors are dearer than normal colors.