In the market for a custom decal set? Whether you’re looking for a couple special details, a complete airline livery, 100 decal sets for your new line of resin kits, some quality vector graphics, or even printing your own artwork, we’ve been known to accept custom work of all kinds when we have the time. In fact, most of our catalog is comprised of custom jobs we’ve helped others with over the years.
What we can help with
We can print a lot of things, but not all. While we’re always looking for a solution, we aren’t able to print white ink, metallics, or opaque colours ourselves yet – but many times we are able to find solutions to this or outsource it. Essentially, our laser-printed decals have a certain element of transparency to them and are designed to be applied over white paint or very pale colours with the exception of black which will go over pretty much anything without any trouble. Our most common work-around for this is simply printing the area around the white or other colour as seen on the Air Canada Tails below. Note a similar technique used for the Tristar windows and doors that wouldn’t otherwise show up properly over a painted red stripe.
In areas where this technique isn’t practical, as is often the case with engine titles or other surfaces with complex curves, we sometimes print on white decal paper with a large background area matching the colour of the underlying paint. These must often be very precisely cut out by the modeller or carefully blended with the surrounding paint though so are recommended only for the more skilful and patient among us or sometimes we can send them away for special printing with opaque white ink.
What we can't help with
Sometimes there are things we simply aren’t able to do a good job of. If we can’t deliver a quality product, we won’t waste your precious time and money. Prime examples of this are liveries requiring decals over non-white paint that can’t be solved by any of the solutions above such as the Fedex and Flying 101 liveries.
How much does it cost?
Most custom work starts around $40-$50 Canadian Dollars. This is often enough to cover the design time and production costs of a single copy of many of the basic liveries out there such as Air France, Lufthansa or Westjet in 1/144 scale. Liveries with more complex artwork such as stripes and murals as seen on Iberia, JAL, and Biman Bangladesh are often in the $60+ range to compensate for the extra time required for design and testing. Unit prices drop drastically with each additional copy ordered.
Having said all that, every job is different and poses it’s own challenges and opportunities! Feel free to contact us with any questions you may have with photos of the aircraft in question and we’ll let you know how we can help.
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Ben Sweezey
V1 Decals