DECORATING YOUR MODELS
WITH A PC AND COLOR PRINTER
For quite some time now I have been investigating the possibilities of creating decals or some similar product with my PC and color printer. I had heard horror stories about the decal paper available; that the ink, from bubble jet type printers, beaded up and ran off the surface. It was certainly expensive enough. I wanted to try it but was too cheap to buy a full pack.
While rummaging through my local craft shop, I found a product called "LIFT OFF" by Bond Adhesives Company of 301 Frelinghuysen Ave. Newark, New Jersey 07114. It was advertised as a transfer medium: Transfers photos and prints to any surface such as wood, glass, metal canvas, ceramics etc. Ah, ha! and the price was only a lousy three bucks. So I thought I would try it. Nothing to loose.
Reviresco has just released the first of a series of WWI aircraft kits in 1/144th scale, and I wanted to assemble and paint some of these delightfully detailed little kits. But I wasn't about to try to hand paint the dazzle camouflage of that age. So I created some artwork consisting of upper and lower German dazzle camouflage in scale sections large enough to cover the wings of the 1/144th scale Fokker D-VII I was working with. I also made some German Crosses in three styles and a few rondles in British and French colors. All these I printed at 720 lpi in full color on an Epson Stylus Color II printer utilizing Epson high quality ink jet paper.
Knowing that jet ink is water soluble and will smear when wet, I used a flat plastic overspray to fix the printed art work. When this was completely dry I followed the instructions on the LIFT OFF bottle. LIFT OFF looks and smells like a form of watered down white glue. You are instructed to apply four medium coats of this material to the print allowing thirty minutes between each coat for drying, plus one hour for the last coat. The LIFT OFF goes on white but dries clear. Once the material has dried (I left mine overnight), you cut out your print and soak it in warm soapy water and then rub the paper off the back. This does require a little care but you can remove the paper easily. It comes off in little balls and wads.
Small items such as little rondels and markings are difficult to work with if cut to size and shape before paper removal.
Once
the paper is removed the print should be drip dried. This is the
point at which it is best to cut out small markings. Be careful
as the film will stretch quit a bit and it is easy to deform
letters and small markings. I found that, as far as the markings
were concerned, it was a lot easier to cut them from the paper
after it had be coated with the flat overspray and then to glue
them directly in place on the aircraft using a little white glue,
than to try to cut them from the film after the paper had been
removed.
I found that in some cases, simply wrapping the fuselage and wings directly with the printed paper and gluing it down with white glue produced excellent results. The accompanying photograph is of a Fokker D-VII, under construction which has been wrapped as described above.
Here is a photo of the top wing from an Albatros D-III. The wing at the top of the picture has been wrapped with the printed paper, the lower wing has been wrapped with the film produced by following the instructions on the LIFT OFF bottle. You can see that even though both were printed at the same time, on the same printer, the LIFT OFF wing is slightly darker in color, (both wings were primed with a flat white spray paint). The LIFT OFF film also conforms much better to the surface detail.
Is it as good as a decal? No, but in many cases the LIFT OFF
film is much superior to just a simple paper wrap. The surface
details can be seen
much
easier. (The wrapped paper wing has the paper cut away over the
radiator, while the LIFT OFF film conforms very nicely to the
shape of the radiator.)
I found that the markings were difficult to handle in the film, so I used cut outs for the insignia. I also wanted to do a Fokker D-VII with a white skull and crossbones on the side of the fuselage. Rather than try to hand paint it, I printed it out and after gluing it to the aircraft, carefully painted up to the edge of the skull. This looked good, not as good as a decal, but better than hand painting.
The wrapped Fokker turned out looking very nice. The edges of
the cutout insignia can be seen if you look closely, but at arms
length are hardly visible.
The Junkers J-1 was painted and decorated with cut out markings. While this technique may not win prizes at the IPMS contests, it is much easier than hand painting, and more than adequate for game pieces.
I hope this article will encourage others to experiment and report their results. John McEwan
This Page Copyright John McEwan 1998 Revised 05/31/00