custom decals or other ideas for complex paint schemes

[brend0n123]

Hi I codrive (navigate) for a bloke in the Queensland Rally Championship who's turning 50 in the next few months.

here is the car, its a M sport fiesta r2

I was thinking about using the belkit s2000

http://www.belkits.com/index.php?action=details&ref=BEL002

but Im at a loss to work out how to do this paint scheme. I was thinking custom decals for the whole car but struggling to figure that out. Im not good enough with the airbrush.

anyone have any other ideas or can recommend anyone who does custom decals

[jwrass]

Brendon,

I'm reasonable sure that the 1:1 is a vinyl wrap, Their are a couple ways you could try!

1) Paint and decals. Many of the shapes and forms can be done with a airbrush but you said that you are not that good at it, so that may rule that out, the contingency decals should not be that hard to find or you can make your own.

2) There are some people who do make custom decals, that may be your only route.

I have not had any custom decals made but have seen them advertised in this sites magazine.

Hopefully someone will answer this post with a recommendation. jwrass

[michael1969]

Might be pricey, but here is my suggestion. Figure the scale of the car to the model for digital pictures. In other words, how far from the car should you take the pictures. Get all views of the car. Then, in your computer, open them and print on paper to fine tune to the model. When they look to fit, print them on decal paper. For compound shapes you may need multiple decals (for pie crusting or compounding). Apply the decals as close as you can to the real car.

[Lunajammer]

If it's a vinyl wrap, then the panel templates already exist. Find out who did the original layout and see if there's a way they'd scale them down, save as a pdf then you can take the files and decal paper to your home printer or a copy shop to print. Since you're a member of the race team it may not be too difficult to ask this favor.

[brend0n123]

Thanks guys, yeah it is a vinyl wrap however the car was bought with this scheme, so I don't have access to the data files.

I was thinking along similar lines to michael with the photos

thanks

Edited July 14, 2014 by brend0n123

[jwrass]

Brendon,

I Agree with Michaels approach. I do vinyl wraps in my business and have many templates and very rarely are they 100 % correct.

I have templates from Pro Vehicle outlines and Aurora graphics and used to update my software libraries on these yearly but stopped about five years ago because I used maybe a few a year and the updates were $ 300/yr Wraps are started to wain for small businesses as they are very expensive and from what I see people are more receptive to partial wraps.

The templates I have are in a 1:20 scale so you have to resize measure yata yata. it's a hassle.

The good news is that you can buy a single files of a particular vehicle and work with that. The files are in a vector format so they are easy work with.

One thing I would do before you commit to decal paper is print your templates out on plain paper, glue those templates on with a low tack craft adhesive ( I use elmers craft bond) this product is like the sticky on a post it note. You can reposition it to get the fit you want, cut darts etc.

Hope this helps jwrass

Edited July 27, 2014 by jwrass