decals

[Anonymous]

I want to make my own decals but I need to find a program to use does anyone know of one so I can make my own like?

[Pennsy58]

I have messed a bit with a decal program that Testors sells. Picked it up at a wal-mart since it was cheap and I wanted to expiriment first. This program does a decent job but it has the inherent problem that all decal software has. You cant print white. There is a printer called an Alps printer that does print white ink, but as I understand it they are out of production and are not cheap.
Stand by as I'm sure more ideas will be posted for you.

[pike-62]

This topic comes up about once per month and has been answered several times. There is no clear cut "perfect" program for designing decals. What "format" is best to use should be the question. Having answered this question several times I decided to put a page on my website explaining this process. It can be viewed at
http://www.dansresincasting.com/custom%20decals.htm
As I wrote in this link, the majority of custom decal makers use what is called a "vector" based drawing as opposed to a "raster" based drawing. To make simple one time decals a raster image could be used and some decal makers actually do use them. I have found over the years that the vector drawings are simpler to use than the raster. One could, and some have, make decals using a simple program such as MS Paint. I personally use Adobe Illustrator (Corel Draw is the same). I even know a gentleman who uses Autocad to make them. Illustrator, Draw and Autocad are all vector based programs.

Dan Pikulski
www.DansResinCasting.com

[MisterBeasley]

With the exception of the "can't print white" problem, you should be able to use pretty much any program to print decals. You are really just printing, just using different paper. You will need the appropriate decal paper for your printer (inkjet or laser), but other than that, you should be able to just paste a graphic into MS Word and print it. It's a little awkward, but try it. Print to plain paper first, because things don't always come out exactly the way you want. If you just want something simple, you can use the Paint program that comes with Windows, too.

I looked around a while back, and you can buy decal paper with a white background, if that's what you need, or with the standard transparent background.

There was a thread a while back, and several people said they had poor luck with inkjet decal paper.

To get a logo, etc., find the picture you want on the web somewhere. Put your mouse pointer on the grapic, and right-click it. You will get an option box. Choose "Save Picture As" and you will be able to save the picture to your local computer disk. Then you can go to Word and choose Insert, and paste in the picture.