posted March 03, 2003 05:49 PM
This weekend I made a full size sample panel on an aluminum blank for the truck design I posted last week. I wanted to be sure I was happy with the choosen colors by the time I do the actual truck. I often print small samples of Edge work to allow for last minute changes. Since this job is one of the higher priced designs I've sold I wanted to take extra care that it ends up looking good. Due to the use of Signgold, & some Avery Shade Shift vinyl as well, no amount of viewing on monitor or paper prints would substitute an actual sample.
Although I will ba happy to have this rather expensive & time consuming sample in my shop, it has served its purpose in the changes it has allowed me to make.
I took some pics during the process, so wanted to line them up here as a first attempt at doing a step-by-step type presentation.
Step 1 was to cover an aluminum blank with Arlon high performance vinyl to simulate the black truck. The parts of the design that were designed to be either red or burgandy went down next. If the client had agreed to the red, I would have edge printed it, but they had been shown some Avery shade-shifter vinyl in the Red-Gold range & asked if that could be substituted.
The design called for a red outline on the SignGold lettering, the small central panel border, & the large outer panel border. When I cut the Red-Gold borders, & I decided to cut the full letters with outline to allow for slight registration error. Since the layout had a slight black outline welded to the black perspective "shadow", I decided to cut this out of the Edge printed background panel allowing the actual truck finish to be the black.
The dark teal color was edge printed, as was the imatation gold border. The white showing on the edge print, is the release liner after weeding. I cut the outer contour that represents the Red-Gold border, & left the Aqua vinyl in that area when masking.
The Edge prints were easily registered by cutting across the line defining the outer Red-Gold border, & lining up to the actual border on the panel. Once the tape hinge was in place i cut off those extra Aqua scraps before applying.
Quite a bit of additional work was involved printing & cutting the additional elements need to complete the sample, & I literally worked through the night finishing all the tweaking of files to create all my printing & cutting files out of my original design. I also ended up doing a few samples of the flower & the central panel to decide on the best colors. There was nothing else that I felt was worth taking pictures of until completion though.
The thing I don't like is the thing I had doubts about from the start. The Shade shift vinyl is no substitute for the red in the original design. It is too dark for where it sits in this layout. The flower was to be red also, but I was able to change that in this sample print. I have thermal receptive Signgold, so I tried a burgandy fade on that & I think it looks OK.
My plan for the final job, is to use red for the borders that are red-gold on this sample, & also for the flower, but to use a white border on the lettering.
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