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Hi ho.

Trying to sort out a set of transfers to print out. At the moment I'm sketching around signs of the zodiac. Have a few different motifs going, capricorn, aries, taurus and leo. Haven't decided which to use yet. Have a mock up of the transfer sheet sorted, but wondered if anyone has had any experience of printing thier own and would like to share any nuggets of wisdom. Not too sure on scaling either, as Gimp seems to think A4 at 1:1 zoom level is far bigger than it is. I think I'll be printing a test page on regular paper before starting.

Noty sure if there's any particular brands out there for transfer paper, and if there's any to avoid.

Seems to show up white here, but the actual sheet is transparent with the badges as seperate layer groups.

EDIT - didn't look down the forum =/

Few things to bear in mind:

1) Work to your printer. If your printer runs at 600 dpi (most do these days) make sure your image is the appropriate size in pixels.

2) Remember that grey is stippled. Don't use tranparency or shades of grey expecting it to look right - printers stipple black over white to produce this effect - keep your images in pure black and white.

3) Remember that you need to seal with an acrylic varnish. More than one coat! Klear / Future is good, but as it's ammonia based bear in mind that microset will disolve it. Don't push things around once solutions are on.

winterdyne wrote:3) Remember that you need to seal with an acrylic varnish. More than one coat! Klear / Future is good, but as it's ammonia based bear in mind that microset will disolve it. Don't push things around once solutions are on.

Unless you're cool enough to have a laser printer.

It's not so much of a hassle anymore.

My colour network laser printer was cheaper than my inkjet printer from 6 years ago (it died and it was cost-effective to replace with the laser).

winterdyne wrote:Few things to bear in mind:

1) Work to your printer. If your printer runs at 600 dpi (most do these days) make sure your image is the appropriate size in pixels.

2) Remember that grey is stippled. Don't use tranparency or shades of grey expecting it to look right - printers stipple black over white to produce this effect - keep your images in pure black and white.

3) Remember that you need to seal with an acrylic varnish. More than one coat! Klear / Future is good, but as it's ammonia based bear in mind that microset will disolve it. Don't push things around once solutions are on.

Thanks all.

Just grabbed your handy dandy tutorials!

I noticed something else that may not have been mentioned...

If you are working with a raster-based graphics program (as in one that uses pixels, which it looks like you are) make your "Master" insignia huge. Like way bigger then you would ever need huge. If you shrink a raster image, it's fine, but if you blow one up, you get a lot of blurring and overall image quality loss. The more you blow it up, the worse it looks.

If you have access to a vector based system (the shapes tools in photoshop is vector based) then you do whatever you want. Vector maps work differently then raster images, so you can take even the smallest of vectors and make it large enough to slap on skyscraper without any real loss of quality.

If you are using photoshop, you can save a bad raster by blowing it up and then using the pen tool to "trace" the original and make a vector version of it. Then you can change the scale all you want.