Moody Blue

Yesterday I had a great opportunity to market my work at a local car show. Friend of mine from work runs a car club that puts several shows a year and allowed me to set up a booth to show case my work. Had a few of my truck guys come up and show off their decals...I mean trucks...as well. Despite the intital snowy...yes snowy in SC in November???....had a decent turn out and my group ended up taking 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place in the truck category. First place was the blackout FX4, second the beautifully wrapped matte blue "wraptor", and third was my bright blue FX4 out of the 7 trucks that attended the show. All this and I was able to hand out lots of business cards. Hopefully this means lots of local business for me!

Looks good!

Here's where you can find a template if someone doesn't already have one. http://www.the-blueprints.com/vectordrawings/show/5204/ford_explorer/ As for design my local PD just got two "murdered out" cruisers that are very incognito...a black charger and durango both with matte black police decals. Similar to the attached image...however this is just one I pulled from Google.

Thanks yeah I prefer the Avery as well much easier than the 3M. Have you tried the Oracal wraps yet? Im curious to how easy those are they have some colors I would like to try.

I would like to use one to make custom truck emblems since 95% of my work is custom truck graphics and wraps. Something to rival Billet Badges but at a much more affordable price. I have a good niche and great following in the custom truck world I think this could be a whole new business endeavor. http://www.billetbadges.com/

Sweet this may be my gateway into 3D printing! Couldnt justify spending $2000+ for something I don't yet even know how to do so maybe this is a good alternative. Are there any reviews from customers to see if it's worth the money or not?

I use the 3m wrap camo for decals. Just need to set your blade pressure to accommodate for the thicker mil vinyl.

Gotta put a little elbow grease into it but the wrap material doesn't leave residue and will protect the paint back to how it was before the wrap was installed.

Took around 16 hrs to do these. Lots of little detail that has to be accounted for when doing a full wrap.

Thanks! So far so good on the blue one. He does mostly faster open trails as opposed to tight limb scraping and rock crawling type trails so I'm not too worried about the wrap getting messed up unless he takes a nasty rollover or something...and let's hope that doesn't happen lol.

Hmmm this has me thinking...my cutting table is a glass top desk with a clear cutting mat. Would these be bright enough to run under the glass to convert into a light table?

you can find the vehicles scaled blue prints online or just find some high res photos to draw the image on. I used my paper template and lots of trial and error to get this hood piece right for a customer. Paper rolls are cheap and wont waste all your precious vinyl to get it right.

When doing vehicle specific graphics like this I prefer to freehand the design in illustrator and then make a paper template to match it up on the car. Take a few measurements first then mock it up to compare against the car. Once it is sized correctly and fits how the customer wants then I would go back and cut the vinyl.

Will do. If things go as planned I should have by the end of the week or sometime next week.

Awesome!

I do all mine in photoshop. These are all just .psd files before the products were even made. I even use these on my personal portfolio as opposed to trying to take professional photographs of them...most people cant tell they arne't real.

Dont quote me on this but I dont see why not. Surface runs a complete operating system unlike ipads and other tablets. Let me know what you find out I am getting one for work this week to run my adobe suite while traveling and working offsite...might be cool to be able to set it up as a back up for cutting too.

Here you go. http://all-free-download.com/free-vector/camo-vector.html

Thanks Wildgoose lets hope it doesnt happen again lol. KristenMarie i would try that and if it continues give them a call. Their service is great. I used them when I switched from a MacBook Pro running Leopard to an iMac running Mavericks before there was driver developed for it. They were able to manipulate the old driver to work on my new machine. But again they only work "normal hours"...unlike me.

I cut some decals last night no problem. Set up to start cutting tonight and when I try to send to plotter I get: "You have cancelled the data transfer to the cutter! Now in order to stop the machine from cutting, click the RESET button on the machine" Happens every time now. I have reset the machine ProCut CR630 and rebooted my Mac just incase. Don't know what else to do.

I ended up uninstalling and reinstalling the software to fix the problem. Not sure why it freaked out but its back up and running now

darcshadow some graphic designers use clipping masks and multiple layers to keep people like us from being able to use them without permission if they dont know how to break the artwork down. I found an easy way around that too by placing medium to low quality .png/.jpeg files into my work so even when opened in a vector program all they can do is trace the bitmap. I agree this image is far too simple for all that BS though. DNA its not hard to clean up an image like this just takes time. It helps to make several copies of the one main image and break into the (in this case 3) individual colors. This one was a black background with yellow, red, more black and then white with black which I would cut the facial feature through the white to show from the previous black layer. Each color was so "fudged" up it involved releasing multiple clipping layers and then welding all those together to make a solid shape. Being that there is no gradient colors not sure why the designer did it this way but whatever not my artwork. When working with images this bad I prefer (once the colors are separated) to work in outline mode so I can see for sure that I clear all the intersecting lines.

Haha yeah I saw all the emails so I figured Id go take a look

Anybody else following the Adobe Max in LA this week and see all the new features and apps available? Im super excited to be able to use my iPad and iPhone to finally be able to work from. New apps that will allow vectorizing of photos that you can take and do right on the spot and then manipulate to have ready in illustrator...all on the fly and saved out to the cloud.

also signwarehouse.com