I’m having trouble generating visible, light colored (yellow) decals to affix to dark (black and PRR maroon) colored locomotives with my ink jet printer.
Dry transfer decals won’t work because it will cost too much to write, “Attleboro & Cape Cod Central” on both sides of 10 steam (black) and diesel (PRR maroon) locomotives and I would never be able to get the lettering lined up straight.
At first I suspected that I didn’t use enough spray fixative so that the yellow letters ran when I loosened the backing in water, so my last run I let the ink dry for 2 hours, then applied 4 separate coats of fixative in 15 minute intervals and let the whole thing dry for 2 hours. The yellow didn’t run but was too light to be seen on the dark background. The decal looked great with the white decal paper background.
I searched old Forum posts and found that the general consensus was to purchase custom made decals from a place like Rail Graphics, but it seems to me I should be able to some how ‘crank up’ the opacity of the yellow from my printer and be on my way.
Your problem is that the yellow needs a light back ground to be seen. You have a few choices here.
Purchase white-backed decal paper and cut carefully around the yellow…then apply it to the loco.
Ask a professional to print off the decals for you and make sure they use a white print first.
If you have a good printer, try re-feeding the decal paper through your printer (hoping that it will line up perfectly again) to thicken up the yellow.
Inkjet printing sets its colors based on a white background. So, light colors will be almost transparent, and will not show up well against a black background. For this classic advertising sign, I painted a white rectangle on the brick wall of the structure, and applied the decal over it.
This is more difficult with lettering, of course. You can make up a string of light-colored letters on a black background, and apply it to a black model. It’s a bit harder with a non-black colored surface, because you need to match the color pretty closely. In this case, some careful weathering should be able to cover up the decal edges.
Since yellow paint would look fine, we have clearly defined the problem that the yellow from the inkjet is not dark/dense/opaque/thick enough to block the dark background color. So how can I program my printer to double or triple the yellow output? This has now become more of a computer/printer question.
I’m not discounting the plans previously listed to solve my problem, but I agree with David B. that it will be quite tough get good registration by running the page through the printer multiple times and I’m still looking to use my own printer to solve the problem, if possible.
It’s a lost cause trying to print yellow or light colored images with an inkjet printer. Many people have tried and many have failed. Even the fabled Alps printer (no longer available) that used colored ribbons needed to print an underlay of white so light colors would work. Decal manufacturers use silk screen printing, whereby heavy paint/ink makes a thick image in lighter colors. Yellow in any medium is the hardest to make opaque - ink, paint, water colors, etc.
If you really want light/yellow lettering its best to have some custom decals made by one of the firms that offer the service.
To visualize the problem, it helps to think of inkjet ink as if it were watercolor paint, since that’s how it behaves. It’s not designed to be opaque, but to blend easily with other colors and to saturate the paper. Inkjet printing is more of a process of applying a controlled series of stains to paper (that the manufacturer assumes will be white, and formulates the ink accordingly) than laying an opaque ink onto the surface of it. This is one of the reasons why kits that are sold to make decals using inkjet printers require special decal paper and fixatives.
Current inkjet technology is just not suitable for light colored decals. To be suitable would require a manufacturer to move to a heavier printer’s ink. And if you think that inkjet cartridges are expensive now…
I addressed this problem by using white-background decal ‘paper’, and surrounding the yellow with a background color that matches the painted dark color as closely as possible. This required a lot of trial-and-error experimentation to make the paint and decal colors match, I needed to also print the RGB values beside each sample swatch so I’d know how to reproduce that same exact color on a decal once I figured it out.
Here is an Atlas Dash 8 in CSX garb, where I printed a decal of the yellow 4-digit road number on a dark blue background and put it on the side of the cab. It’s definitely not a perfect color match, but from a 3-foot viewing distance, I don’t notice the discrepancy.
Thanx. I cut just beyond the borders of the digits, so it would show as little of the ‘decal’ blue color as possible. Then I simply aligned the decal like I would any other.
When the Micro-Sol dries, you might see a tiny ‘crack’ of white at the border of the decal film. Sometimes I hide this by dabbing a tiny amount of the dark-colored paint along the top and side edges with an untra-fine paint brush.
