Custom Decals

Seen some great home-made custom decals here lately and want to try making some myself, but I've got a couple of questions you guys may be able to help me with....

1) What software do you use to create your designs? I've got an old version of CorelDRAW at work which seems to do everthing I need at the moment but really I want something (not too expensive!) that I can use at home.

2) What decal paper do you use? I've got some Lasertran but not used it yet, and I can get some SuperCal locally. Are these any good?

Thanks for any help you can give.:smile:

1) Scroll down to "graphics."
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=33&threadid=997283&enterthread=y
I don't have a first-hand experience with any of these, but you can find pretty good graphic manipulators for free.

2) SuperCal should work, but it's not so popular around here, because the moment you post a question like this, people will point you to the Alps thermal-wax printer, which is expensive and hard to find outside Japan.

The tricky part of the inkjet decal papers is the sealing of image with the fixing spray, and sometimes image gets blurred. Several light mist coat should prevent it.

I recently made some Decals for my Peugeot 205 T16 to convert it to the '86 Rac rally.They were made on my inkjet printer.I used Microsoft paint which I think is free with Windows XP to design some of the decals and alter some existing decals that I had scanned in from another decal sheet.I got the decal paper from this site,http://www.themodelcatalogue.com/
I also used Microscale Liquid decal film to seal the printed decals,which I brushed on after they had dried overnight.It dries with no brush marks, almost instantly,3 coats is usually enough.You then simply cut out your decals and apply in the usual manner.

I have been making custom decals for a few years now. I use Adobe Illustrator and I print them with an ALPS printer. I tried to print some with an INK JET printer but gave up when all the ink ran into the middle of the page on the ink jet decal paper. As I am paid to do the custom art work for people I paid out the extra to get the proper printer that is able to print in white, silver, gold as well as the normal colours. This was expensive so not for some one that is looking at doing it from home, privately.