Ye Olde Decal Project

[Evil Eye]

On 10/12/2023 at 9:28 AM, NovemberIX said:

 I've also looked into getting printers for decals and what not and the lesson I learned is that yeah, it's expensive. Most printers that use white ink natively are commercial in nature and price, think 6K usd for a "basic" white ink printer from what I've found. Though honestly, there are more options these days than there used to be, for a while there was only one company I could think of that made a printer that used a white cartridge, and now Oki has a full set of printers, I think Epson does as well, though I'd probably steer well clear of an HP offerings you may find.

 

A Solution that may not work, maybe run it though a second time? In most print processes the colors are layered one by one with black going down first as the "key" color that all the rest then printed to match.  My process would be

 

• Print white layer first as a mask base
• Print Color layers over the mask
• Print Black to finish off

All of this is contingent on the printer actually holding alignment, but in theory it is semi plausible 

I had thought of that, unfortunately my decal paper does not like being put through the printer more than once; the slight curling causes jams if you try and run it through twice.

[Evil Eye]

Quick update: I have discovered a nifty trick to making more efficient use of decal paper rather than having to fill up an A4 sheet every time I want to use it. Take your design, place it on an A4 document of sufficient DPI in photo editor of choice and then print it on normal paper. Then, cut out a sufficiently sized piece of decal paper to completely cover the design and carefully affix it to the paper with sellotape. Change the print settings to heavy glossy, and run the piece through the printer again! It'll make your paper go much further without having to worry about futzing with the feed tray or anything like that, as using the "carrier paper" method means you can print sheets as small as you need to, meaning one A4 sheet will give you plenty of prints without having to run a whole sheet through multiple times and risk jamming.