what do you think of my first car wrap attempt?

[Jason Xuereb]

Looks good. What looks rough up close?

Also how did you finish it on the doors in the whole door covered and printed with black?

From the pics it looks totally seamless.

[Quentin Tomkies]

Thanks Jason. Just some of my cuts where I have trimmed around headlights and grille etc are a bit rough. Also where it is tucked in the bottom scoop is fairly uneven. I don’t have any more photos on this computer to show the detail.
The car is black anyway, so wasn’t sure how to finish off the flames on the doors – I didn’t want to wrap the sides with plain black printed vinyl, so I trimmed the vinyl along the edge of the flame. In effect the vinyl has a diagonal ‘edge’ down the door. I’m not very happy with the result though. Can anyone suggest a better method of doing this? I thought of taking the black print through to the rear edge of the front door, but a large expanse of black ink doesn’t look very good, plus doesn’t match the metallic black paint very well…

Cheers
Q

[Jason Xuereb]

Het Owen,

You’ll learn.

When you make your cuts use the shape of the headlights as a cutting guide. Don’t heat and push the vinyl in there. Just lay it over the top and then trim it. It will give you about 5mm of vinyl you can then nicely tuck in. Usually with lights and rubbers you can tuck this vinyl behind the light of the rubber by pushing it in with your squeegee.

I’ll get a link to the Sign and Graphics magazine which has the cutting technique.

As to finishing that design on the door that’s why I asked it looks pretty seamless.

Can you see the white edge of the vinyl against the car where you cut around the flames? If not I would do it this way.

[Jason Xuereb]

Link: http://emags.nbm.com/sb/20090501/full/72.html

[Quentin Tomkies]

Thanks for the link, that looks like some good info!

I’ll try to get a better photo of the door – yes, you can see the white edge, and the black printed vinyl doesn’t match the black paint very well – overall I’m not very happy with the result. Not sure how else to do it – maybe I might just have to use a different design…

Cheers
Q

[Jason Xuereb]

I’ve seen a company I think from QLD or NSW where they wrapped their ute using a clear cast. But their car was silver and worked for their design. Wouldn’t work on a black car unless you could print white. I think cutting out the design is probably as good as its going to get.

[Quentin Tomkies]

I just went and took a photo of the side – as you can see it doesn’t finish particularly well. 😕
I really like the design, but perhaps beyond my capabilities…
It’s coming off soon anyway, I’ll just have to see what else I can try!

Cheers
Q

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[Jason Xuereb]

Your black doesn’t look particularly black in your print.

Are they the aurora flames?

What printer and rip you using?

You can get a very rich black if your replace the black in your file in the rip and override it to print

10% Cyan and 100%K

This should give you a lot closer match to your car.

[Quentin Tomkies]

You’re right – the black in the print isn’t very black… printed on a Versacamm 540. The flames are a jpeg image off the Aurora Digital Firestorm disk. Setup on Corel X4, and sent through the VersaRip program. I’m very new to digital printing, so still learning about image manipulation – not sure how to adjust colours on a jpeg image??

Cheers
Q

[Jason Xuereb]

How Quentin have you got Photoshop and Illustrator?

[Quentin Tomkies]

No, I only have Paint Shop Pro, which I am just learning to use…

Cheers
Q

[Jason Xuereb]

You need to get the flames into a vector program and apply the background as a square and set it to 100% K.

Then in Versaworks setup a special color to override that color which will ignore the ICC profile and spit out a really rich dense black.

If you want I can create a tutorial using Illustrator and Photoshop to show you how its done.

[Quentin Tomkies]

Mate, any help I can get is always greatly appreciated.
At the moment, I only have X4 Corel Draw and Paint Shop Pro, ripping with Versaworks – can it be done with these programs??

Cheers
Q

[Jason Xuereb]

Hey it probably can but I don’t use them so can’t tell you how to do it. I am uploading my demo right now. Its about 30mb so quite large I will post the link when its done.

[Quentin Tomkies]

Thanks very much for that Jason – very good indeed!

Probably my only concern with this particular design, is that on the Aurora disk, it only comes in jpeg format, not tiff, so the black background is part of the image…

Cheers
Q

[Jason Xuereb]

Is this off the digital firestorm collection or another?

[Quentin Tomkies]

Yep, Digital Firestorm. All of the other images on the disk are in tiff, but these were in the ‘Bonus Flames’ section – and only in jpeg format.

Cheers
Q

[Jason Xuereb]

Cool. You can always remove the black background in photo shop. Select colour range then delete.

I should check out the bonus folder 🙂

I’m going to head off. Had enough work for today.

[Quentin Tomkies]

Thanks heaps for your help mate.
As I said, I have much to learn in the digital printing field! 🙂
I’ll probably end up with a different design next time anyway…

Cheers
Q

[John Wilson]

I’d also like to see this demo please 😎

[Jason Xuereb]

I think my post got deleted so maybe I broke the rules.

Edit: Yes I can’t put stuff on my company domain. I’ll re upload it to another domain which doesn’t mean anything and has no commercial attachment.

[Jason Xuereb]

http://zoju.com/Flames_Rich_Black.swf

Right click to download or it will start playing in your browser.

Pretty sure that satisfies the rules.