Make Your Own Decals

[ruzlkampf]

Whew! That part is done. Hurray! Let's make some kill markings now. Whoaaaah Nelly, not so fast. Yes, we can thump our chests like some silver-backed gorilla and crow about our prowess with making some block letters now,.....but we have some limitations (gaaaaah I hate that word) here. Come sit down beside me for a short chat whilst I wax eloquent. I'm going to pull out that magic key to illusion I talked about called 'resolution'. Not going to get technical, cuz we're dummys and Derek is already nodding off again back there. We just want to know how to put a serial number on our Piper Cub, right?

Remember on one of the first posts I had about re-sizing your 'canvas' to fit your decal paper? I underlined what the 'resolution' was in the paint program while ya'll were throwing spitballs at each other? On my home PC it's 68 dots(pixels) per inch.(at work it's 81 dots per inch,.....or you'll see it written dpi) I'll have to ask my 'European Consultant' what it is in metric, but ya'll get the idea right? This is no accident that the numbers are in this range. The human eye can't differentiate too good on anything over 72dpi and things blend into illusions that are recognizable as images to us. Anything less than 72dpi looks to our eyes like those jagged pixellated letters of mine under zoom. Those hotty-totty guys like ScanmanDan with their Photoshop software can begin an image at 300-600+ dpi. That's 3 times more dots than we got. What does this mean. More dots,....'smoother' less jagged image. I'm going to illustrate that here under the guise of making kill markings and kill 2 birds with one stone. But first, I'm going to run to the 24hr mini-mart and get some java whilst everybody talks amongst themselves.....and ponders the pixel. Back in about 5 minutes;

 

 

 

[Derek B]

...We're not going to let Derek have anything sharp and pointy.....

 

...Probably a very wise move!...

 

(Can't wait to get all of this in hard back once it is all done )

 

Yours cordially

 

Your 'European Consultant'

 

zzzzzzzzz

[ruzlkampf]

OK, I'm back. Derek! You're AWAKE? Whuh oh, and here I am giving him crust and talking about him behind his back. For those who have been following along, you must've figured out by now that Derek and I are dear old friends,.....and I've known him for a least a week, and my 1/2 brothers 4th cousin married his adopted uncles 5th wife before she ran off with a camel and hasn't been seen since. So basically we're brothers with a different mother who can almost claim to be related. I hope I got that right? Bahahaha! Hey, I'm a dumba$$ American who can't count past 9 cuz I ran over one of my toes with a lawnmower after I rolled into that fire dreaming spiders were chasing me and only woke up cuz of the smell of burning hair and haven't been able to blink since.....throw me a bone here, OK? heh heh, I was hoping you'd join in the fun buddy.....we're going to talk about dots now,and I know that's a subject dear to your heart and something you've been pondering since adolescence.

" How small is small Russ?" ( No, I'm not talking to myself, I'm just musing aloud) Let's ponder the imponderable shall we class? Before ramble off into quantum physics and my pizza gets cold. lets find out. My 68dpi dot above is as small as I can go, but somebody with a 300dpi canvas would be able to go 3 times smaller and be able to draw in much more detail. There is still a law of diminishing returns here somewhere. A squadron badge on a 1/144 scale Phantom is only so big, and a 1/250 Phantom badge would only appear as a dot to our human eyes no matter how much detail it had under a microscope. We're going to create an illusion of a German WWII kill marking in 1/32nd scale. This usually consisted of a British roundel on top of a white bar. Lets use that red dot as the center of that roundel (curious fact about digital painting, there are technically NO circles.....they're round squares if that makes any sense) and go around it with a bit of blue to leave a one pixel white center roundel. This is as small as we can go.

 

 

[ruzlkampf]

Now remember my 'M' is 3/4 inch tall? (that's about what,...18-20mm to the rest of the world?) I'm going to use my pencil an deftly make an illusion of this kill marking. As everybody can see, this wouldn't work for squat on a 1/48th or 1/72nd model, but just squeeks by in 1/32nd. I hope. Now that I've made one,...I'm going to do the select/copy/paste thing to make a row of them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And this is what I came up with;

 

 

 

 

[ruzlkampf]

Let's use the magnifying glass to zoom back out and see what we've got. I can see the red center of the roundel on my original, but the limitations of posting here make it kinda tough for everybody else here. This is actually just about right, but I don't like the spacing so we'll move them a few pixels closer.

 

 

 

 

 

Like this;

 

 

 

[ruzlkampf]

You'll see what it looks like all bunched up in a bit. Now I want to do some upper wing crosses. Just like for the codes on the fuselage sides I took a piece of paper and 'guesstimated' about how big they are by crudely drawing with paper/pencil. After measuring the overall length/width,....it came out to be 1-1/4 inches. This doesn't have to be too exact, remember how we can select an image after it's drawn on our canvas and resize it to exactly what we want anyway? It's always a good idea to get it fairly close to begin with, because there's a GOLDEN RULE when doing image editing. "Big image reduced smaller.....GOOD, small image enlarged bigger,....BAD". More on that in a future tutorial.

 

 

 

[ruzlkampf]

Going back into my dungeon, I hold a ruler up to my monitor and draw a line to use for a 'ruler' for scaling out my new marking. Again, the reason for showing how I'm doing the markings for the ME-110 are for their simplicity. I couldn't have chosen a better subject.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Doing my chicken-peck pixel counting method to get a width for my white crosses, and using my digital 'scale' to get things lined up.

 

 

 

[ruzlkampf]

Select my 'ruler' and slide it over to even it up against my drawing to get a 1-1/4inch overall height. Your methods may vary, but ya'll get the idea?

 

 

[ruzlkampf]

Doing the same to get a width;

 

 

 

[ruzlkampf]

Pic says it all;

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aaaaaand after doing some erasing(doesn't this go a lot quicker now that the Paint tutorial is done?), this is what I have to 'save as' a .tiff file for working on tomorrow. I'm VERY tempted to get more into the illusion thing by drawing some light grey dots into those pixellated 'steps' on the sides of my letters to show ya'll how it would blend everything in and fool your eyes into thinking those letters are as sharp and crisp as a potato-chip. Don't want to bog everybody down by going on a tangent....but it might be a beneficial exercise to pursue before I get into printing? Hmmmm, I'll ponder that dilemma tomorrow. For now, this is where we'll pause,.....wake Derek up and send him home.....and dismiss class for today. Thanks everyone for being such a lovely audience and not pelting me with stones and rotten tomatoes, and booooing me off stage. Next lesson will be getting into printing something out to see what it looks like. Later!, Russ

 

 

 

[PhilB]

Night Night Teecher!

Over here in Euro La La land my paint programme says 91dpi so mines in inches too. Does this mean mine is bigger than yours????

Don't understand it! I drive a German car where everything is metric but it has a MILES per GALLON guage on the dash. Wish they'd make their minds up. I'd make my mind up if I had one.

When we gonna do rude ladies to put on our cowlings eh??

 

Brilliant tutorial Russ!

 

Phil (got my nappy on now!)

[big matt]

Mr. Kampf, sorry to be a bother but is it too late to audit this class? I promise, no kibutzing or instigating.

 

Second question. Will this work with my low tech 80 dollar ink-jet printer/scanner/copier/fax machine?

 

Thanks,

 

Matt

[Javlin1]

OH!!OH!!! OH!!!! (arm extended) can I go to the ladies room

[Out2gtcha]

...................... can I go to the ladies room

 

Um..........

[ruzlkampf]

ACHTUNG! All rise class! Your hairy knuckled, non-blinking, low sloping forehead with close set eyed teacher, who hasn't learned how to walk erect yet has arrived to pontificate(sorry, I shouldn't use them big words to this crowd) once again on the subject of decal-making. heh heh.

 

 

 

Thanks Russ!

 

The pleasures all mine Dan! Hey, anybody who has a Texas Instruments programmable calculator under their desk, a pocket pencil protector, AND already knows how to do Photoshop must be bored to tears being down here in the basement banging rocks together at 'our' level?! Glad to see you still with us dude! For your persistence and patience you get moved over to the only window LSP put into our padded cell,....oh ehrmm I mean classroom on this forum. Your new responsibilities are heavy. Keep an eye out for the ice-cream truck coming by so we don't miss the chance to pile outta here and get a snow-cone.....and tell us when the lady across the street who doesn't wear underwear comes out to bend over and water her flowers. We need plenty of advance notice to flock to the window to glean any 'inspiration' for future WWII nose-art. You also get a title bestowed upon your person! (no, there isn't a need to bow and kiss my ring....,really )

I think Vice Under-Secretary, of the Assistant Magistrate, Who Is Under The Table, That Can Count Over 20, is a befitting your station. That's a lot of capital letters,...you should be proud. We're going to call you the 'math dude' (hey, every class has one, right? ). I think I might need some help with some cipherings in the future. Congratulations!

 

 

 

Night Night Teecher!

Over here in Euro La La land my paint programme says 91dpi so mines in inches too. Does this mean mine is bigger than yours????

Don't understand it! I drive a German car where everything is metric but it has a MILES per GALLON guage on the dash. Wish they'd make their minds up. I'd make my mind up if I had one.

When we gonna do rude ladies to put on our cowlings eh??

 

Brilliant tutorial Russ!

 

Phil (got my nappy on now!)

 

No Phil, Just because you have 91dpi doesn't mean 'yours' is bigger than 'mine'. 91dpi is your resolution, not the size of your manhood.(sheesh, where do these guys come from? ) I'll explain things to ya about your car when you get old enough to drive. We aren't going to do 'rude' ladies here,.....we're going to do 'rude,nude,nekkid or 1/2 nekkid floosies in compromised poses to put on cowlings. Your homework assignment is to go thru all your daddys Playboy magazines and find suitable subject matter. Better yet , just bring them to class tomorrow and we'll pass them around and we'll judge for ourselves.

 

 

Mr. Kampf, sorry to be a bother but is it too late to audit this class? I promise, no kibutzing or instigating.

 

Second question. Will this work with my low tech 80 dollar ink-jet printer/scanner/copier/fax machine?

 

Thanks,

 

Matt

 

Tardy!? TARDY!? Quiet down class, we've got some new meat here who wants to crash our party. Ya'll know what that means, eh? Should have known that this guy would show up right about the time nudey women are mentioned. Price of admission after the class starts is to be heedlessly heckled, AND you must run the 'gauntlet' of your new classmates while they rifle thru your pockets and steal all your candy and lunch money. We don't tolerate 'goody-two-shoes here little mister, and if you don't know how to kibitz or instigate.....well you'd better get a book or ask Mr. Derek back there in the corner how it's done. Yeah, I know the air is foul back there....but take your vicious reference-eating dog and park yourself in the back row and try to act busy. Don't worry about Derek, we took his pencil away from him.....and well, we haven't figured out how to keep him from chewing on crayons and eating paste but he's harmless. I think?

Any printer that has been purchased in the last 10 years is probably capable of doing over 1000dpi without a sweat. Way more capable of printing anything we'll be able to create in Paint.

 

OH!!OH!!! OH!!!! (arm extended) can I go to the ladies room

 

 

If we keep having this problem with incontinence,....I'm going to have to ask the mods here to install a bathroom on this forum. I'm loathe to do this because even though we're dummys......I'd feel stupid. If it will ease your anxiety and keep us from having to watch you hopping around holding your crotch,.....just close your eyes and pretend we have a 'ladies room' and let it go. I'm going to have to seat you over there next to Phil and the puddle he already has under his desk until LSP can hire a janitor to come clean this mess up. if you're lucky, Phil will probably pop you one of those beers I know he keeps in his back pack. I have eyes in the back of my head!

 

 

 

Now, if there are no more interruptions....... I have an announcement!