Hi folks, I have recently been making some decals for resto projects using waterslide decal paper and my ink jet printer with some really excellent results. I was wondering if anyone else has any experience with this and could offer any tips or suggestions as to tecniques or drawing programs to take this to the next level. I have been using my word program and paint program up to this point.-TM
Virtually anything will give you more precise control over text placement than Word. If your scanner happened to come with Adobe Photoshop Elements (a cut down version of Photoshop), it would serve you very well. I think Photoshop Elements is also availabe for separate sale. Paint Shop Pro is a similar program that’s inexpensive and easy to use, and you can try it out before you buy it.
Use a digital camera, and the sky’s the limit as to what you can do, with one small exception. You can’t print white. You can get white decal film, and that will help make the colors brighter, but then you have to trim close.
Unfortunately the ALPS printer is no longer being made. This printer is capable of not only printing in white, but metalic silver and gold. You can still find them on eBay, and the supplies for them are still available.
In the past I have used Mac programs like Photoshop and Quark Express to do decals and logos. Quark is a desktop publishing program and completely suited to this sort of thing. I have downloaded some railroad logos, but discovered that scanning them in myself from clean, sharp copy yielded better results. The nice thing about doing this, especially for an 027 guy like me, is that you can custom make the decals to fit the car, rather than having to buy several sets of the same decals in HO, S and O scale - which I have frequently done in the past.
I have stuck to just doing black lettering/logo decals. I experimented doing some colors ones, but found the colors just did not print solid enough to make me happy. So for these I use Microscale decals, where the colors are screen printed and much more solid.
On buying pre-made decals, I’ve learned to buy hearld sets in HO and then mix them with capacity sets, lettering, etc. from S scale and O scale sets… when your cars are not full precise scale, you learn to take some liberties. Which is pretty prototypical in itself, since the real railroads frequently took liberties especially when money was involved.
I use paint shop pro or Adobe photoshop along with a ALPS printer. You might want to check out a web site. Do a search for tango papa decals. He has a page with instrctions on how to make decals. With the apls printer I can do white and gold, silver colors. I also buy my decal paper from Tom aka tongopapa. He make some very thin decal paper. I have been using it on model rockets and trains.
QuarkXPress would be outstanding for this kind of work, but bear in mind it’s not an inexpensive piece of software. You’re talking $1,000 price range. Its learning curve is also a bit steep. (I took two full-length college classes on it way back when. Learned a ton and at least I can say I got pretty proficient in it. But that was 1996…)
Thanks guys, this info should put me into the next level-TM
Can you use the Paint Shop program that is included with Windows itself? I also have PhotoShop 6.0. Would that be better? Would this be similar to desktop publishing that you would do for plain paper only on decal film? I’m really interested in this. I would like to try this too.
Windows’ built-in Paint program is adequate for very simple decal making but it isn’t very powerful. Photoshop 6.0 is a considerably more powerful program, though with a correspondingly steeper learning curve.
Desktop publishing actually encompasses several disciplines. A traditional “desktop publishing” program, such as QuarkXPress, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Pagemaker, and I’ll grudgingly include Microsoft Publisher in this group as well, is for page layout–arranging elements on a printed page. This includes text boxes and graphics imported from other programs. CTT is, in all likelihood, arranged with either QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign.
QuarkXPress has excellent text-handling capabilities. You can finely adjust the spacing between letters and lines. So if you find a close match on the font but the letters are just a little too close together or a little too far apart, you can move them, 1/72 of an inch at a time. It also has fairly good capabilities for lines and curves, etc.
Programs like Adobe Photoshop are best used for photographs and other images that won’t be re-sized, or will only be made smaller and at the same ratio. These are called “raster” images.
Programs like Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia Freehand also have excellent text handling capabilities and outstanding line-drawing capabilities. A drawing made in these programs (known as “vector drawing” programs) can be scaled at will, without losing any detail or getting any ugly pixelation.
A magazine like CTT will use all three types of programs at any point in time. Photographs will be edited in Photoshop; the “Classic Toy Trains” flag on the front cover was most likely drawn in Illustrator or Freehand; and all of the graphic elements will be brought together with the text in a program like QXP or InDesign. The technical drawings in scratchbuilding articles may have been drawn with a vector drawing program or they may have been drawn with something like AutoCAD.
If you’re mak
Very good explanation Dave… that should help everyone.
Yes, Quark is wonderful in certain respects. I found myself (as you alluded to) being able to “mimic” railroad type faces by playing around with type faces and stretching them, condensing them, etc. The Erie Lackawanna and Norfolk Southern type faces were two that I recall I was able to duplicate with a little experimenting.
With any artform or technique, it is important to know the limitations of your technology and equipment. But once you understand that, the sky’s the limit if you know how to compensate and be creative. Remember, the “Sgt. Pepper” album by the Beatles was recorded on 4-track equipment… an amazing feat when you think about everything that went into that album, yet they still did it.
Or as I was once told by an art teacher: to be good, follow the rules - but to be great, write you own rules.
Thanks, Brian.
One thing to keep in mind is that while there are CDs that bill themselves as containing 1,001 fonts, in the real world a surprisingly small number of fonts ever achieved widespread use, and many of those were only popular for a few years before giving way to another design that matched the new decade’s trends. And knock-offs abound. The best example in recent times is Helvetica and Arial. Arial is a knock-off, and you’d be hard pressed to tell which was which if you saw them printed side by side. Usually the biggest difference between the knockoff and the real thing was the spacing between the letters. And in logo design, anything goes. A designer will likely use an existing font but is likely to take liberties with the spacing.
A handy trick is to print out complete alphabets, upper and lower case, and numbers, for every font you have. Then look for something distinctive in the font you’re trying to match. The “N” in Union Pacific’s herald should be a dead giveaway, and 7 or 8 years ago I could have told you in an instant what font it was. I’m embarrassed that I can’t come up with it. It was a font that became popular in the 1920s. Century Gothic is the closest match that this PC has, but I don’t think that’s it.
Anyway, with a little practice, you can get really good at matching pretty fast. As you can see, I need to be doing some practicing myself.
Absolutely right Dave. From my years in the desktop publishing biz, there are many near identical typefaces. Usually differences can be spotted with lower case letters a, g, k and t. So for guys looking to create decals, one more suggestion… you can buy hearlds and logos from Microscale (HO scale hearld sets usually work pretty good for many O gauge applications). A sheet of Microscale Penn Central hearlds will contain a whole sheet of just the PC logo and the Penn Cental words. Then you can create your other words: dimension, capacity, loading instructions, etc. on your computer.
Check out some real train cars and you’ll see that capacity and dimension info typefaces can vary a lot between different cars even on the same railroad line. Plus some cars can have very specific instructions as to destination or loading info. Many times these additional warnings are added later and once again, may be in a totally different type face from the other lettering on the train car. This sort of stuff is very easily done on the computer and can be made to custom fit the train car you are looking to decal.
I use COREL DRAW to make the image and then print it using my inkjet printer on the paper supplied by SUPERCAL manufactured by micro format , Wheeeling , IL ( See www.paper-paper.com)
The paper comes in white and clear backgrounds. It produces a water-slip decal.
Alan
What is the best decal paper to use - i have been trying this out with lazertran - but want to find out what is best to use?
Boy, some folks are doing some digging… seen a few threads from several years ago pop back up in the last couple of days.
Geedub, I can’t say it’s the best, but I use Microscale blank stock. I do think Microscale decals are the best, bar none. The thing with any blank stock being run through a copier or computer printer to make decals is you need to clear coat them before applying. That spraying adds a little bit of thickness to the decals.
Microscale screen prints their decals, and I can’t say whether they get coated in their manufacturing process, but they do go on good and the edges can be hidden. Decals you make yourself and then coat, will be a little harder to make the decal edges disappear as well.
brianel027,
A couple of questions. Does Microscale have blank stock available for laser printers? Do you need to clear coat decals done on a laser printer?
When I was considering making some of my own I was using this site as a reference base www.makedecal.com/ and buyying my supplies locally.
FWIW CTT did use Quark, but changed to Indesign a few years ago. Quark was a bit more user-friendly.
I’ve had good luck making decals with the Testors film system, and formatting them with either MS Office (Word) or Appleworks. I use two printers at home an HP 1610 and a Kodak 5100 and I think the HP does a better job on the decals.
I have been expermenting with lazertran - the only drawback is that you apply varnish or polyurethane after the decal is on the intended surface - i just applying two ways today - one with a small brush - looks brushed on and not acceptable, and the second was with my airbrush.
I put the decal on a test f3 body, then i sprayed polyurethane on the entire body - it looks good, but I will wait until it dries to give the final verdict. I am not crazy about this method, but one thing about it is that the decal edges disapear into the poly so you have no edges (thats a good thing) but then you are applying poly to the entire body of the train and i am not sure if that will work well. Will keep you posted
gw
John, some years ago I worked in graphic arts, where I had access to to up-to-date Mac equipment. I tried printing the decals directly through the printer, and found it was easier to get accuracy as far as alignment and copy darkness through a copier.
I used Microscale blank decal stock. First I printed the sheet of decals I was making onto normal copy paper. I had pre-measured the size of the Microscale sheet and made alignment marks outside of this area. Then I Scotch taped the decal sheet (from the end going into the copier) right on top of the printed copy I had just made.
As talked about above, I think Quark is the most ideal program to do this kind of stuff with… as far as designing the letting and logos that will become the decals. I’m sure you can flub it with other computer programs, but not with the accuracy, options and versatility of Quark, along with Photoshop and Adobe.
The decals I made were black in color only and I resorted to making only what I could not find commercially. I made the decals for my CSX orange scheme MOW loco, as well as some Conrail and Norfolk Southern MOW cars. And some Penn Central stuff too as most the PC decals out there are with white lettering. I had experimented with the color printer, but wasn’t happy with the color saturation - there really is no beating screen printed decals.
At one time, I remember talking to a guy at Microscale. Whether he told me I NEEDED to coat the decals before applying them, I don’t recall. I think he advised doing it. Seems to me I must have seen an article in the Model Railroader, where doing that was advised also. I know I did just as a precautionary measure. Maybe someone else here with experience can chime in as to whether you can apply the decals without clear coating them… that is without the copy made lettering being affected by the decal fluid.