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Making Custom Decals

This first step is the most critical step in the entire custom decal creation process. If the decal artwork is wrong, in any way, how it is finally rendered on decal film and applied to the model is irrelevant. I spend many hours working and reworking images until I am satisfied that they are exactly how I want them.

On the computer I find various software products work well for creating the needed artwork. Which product I use is dependant on what markings I am trying to create. I do most of my work in plain old Microsoft (MS) Paint. I stick with this product because it is available to me for free (after paying for the PC) as part of the Windows operating system. Don't laugh. MS Paint has a lot of function that most people never take time to figure out. I have amazed various friends with what I can do quickly in MS Paint. One issue, though, is that this has me working in bitmap (BMP) files. BMP files can be quite large, even for a relatively small image.

To reduce the amount of space that the images take on my hard-drive, I compress the BMP files into GIF files. I purchased a small product called the GIF Construction Set from Alchemy Mindworks Inc. to do the maintenance on these GIF files. The GIF Construction Set uses MS Paint to allow editing of the images stored in the GIF format. This software also provides access to the GIF color pallet that internally controls all the colors of the GIF image. By editing the colors in the color pallet, I can effect the entire decal master image without even having to open the actual image. This is very useful for quickly and easily correcting color balance issues in the master image.

I have yet to invest in the immensely expensive Corel or Adobe art products. I have yet to be convinced that they provide anything that I can not do in the other software products already on my PC. This said, though, I have been approached to do artwork for a decal manufacture, and their need of getting the files into EPS format may finally drive me to buying one of these overrated products.