I needed a few special decals recently and I couldn't find any in my collection. So I decided to make some homemade decals. Since there have been a few posts asking about making decals recently I thought I would take a few pictures as I made the decals and add a narrative. Here's last week's project.
Here's what I needed for the project:
Printer
Decal Paper
Sealant
Some type of software that will let me create and print the designs I need.
I have a three year old Hewlett-Packard color printer. It's an ink jet printer and does not print white.
I have both clear and white decal paper on hand. If you need paper I know you can get it from Micro-Mark link and from Bare Metal Foil link . I've also seen decal making kits from Testors in some stores. My decal paper came with directions on how to make the decals. You can get clear or white decal paper and the paper is available for laser and ink jet printers. I don't know if there's any paper that will work in both types of printers.
I have Krylon Crystal Clear Gloss and some Micro Liquid Decal Film to seal the decals (Krylon aerosol for big projects and the decal film for the smaller ones).
I used Microsoft Power Point to create the designs I needed.
Projects:
- Decals for some 1/100 scale Me-109s and Fw-190s in I and IV JG.3 (and some for a nationalist Breda 65 that's in the works).
- Aircraft names for two specific 1/100 P-51Bs and some windows for 1/144 scale Pe-2s.
- I made the design and did a test print on regular paper. The test run lets me see if the colors look right and if the decals are the right size and shape. Decal paper is expensive and I would rather not have to buy more than I need. Here's the test run of the German and Nationalist decals (I used half a sheet of a 8.5 inch by 11 inch piece of decal paper). You can see where I've cut the prototype decals out so that I could fit them against the model to double check everything.
picture
- I was satisfied with that set but I was not satisfied with the ones I'd done for the P-51s, more on those later.
- Once I was satisfied with the P-51 decals I taped them to a piece of cardboard (this is the other half of the sheet of decal paper I used for the Germans & Nationalists). I taped it down so that I would have an edge to hold on to, so that the decal sheet would remain flat while I sprayed a sealant on it, and so that I could prop the decals in front of a fan to help dry the sealant. Here are the decals ready to be sealed. picture
- And, here's what the sealed German and Nationalist decal sheet looked after they were sealed. picture
Notice that I made more decals than I needed…that's because I know I'm going to screw up a couple of them during the process. The first time I sealed the German and Nationalist sheet I did not use enough sealant. As soon as I put one decal in the water the ink started to bleed off of the sheet. So, it was back outside with some more sealant for the rest of the sheet.
Here you can see the homemade "squiggle" on the white fuselage bands of some Fw-190s from III/JG.3 picture
The rest of the story for the P-51 decals. I have two problems with the P-51 decals. First, the decals have to have yellow writing on them…yellow looks good when it's printed on white paper but not when it's printed on clear paper and then place on a dark color. Second, I can't print yellow words on white paper without having to deal with the white paper that surrounds the yellow lettering.
What I ended up doing was to use the graphics software to make the words I wanted. I colored them yellow, and then I "filled" the area around the text with various shades of green with the software. I tried to get shades of green that where close to the color of the P-51s.
Once I had the colors about right I printed the sheet. I then placed small white decals on the model where the yellow text would be. Once the white decals were seated and dry I applied the homemade decals over the white area. And then I tried to hide the difference between the decal and the paint job as best I could.
White under decal: picture
Finished P-51B picture
And, just for grins here's a picture of decals used to represent some windows under the nose of a 1/144 scale Soviet Pe-2. These decals were on the same sheet as the P-51s. picture I painted additional details on them after they were in place.
Kevin
experiments with using recessed bases for figures with cast-on bases.