w00kiee77

Fairly new to this site and new to custom minifigs, but it's great to see a fellow Aussie trying to get some custom figs off the ground, they look great! I'm trying to get some NBL figures done, but ended up just going with stickers, but being able to get them professionally printed is the dream! Just a shame we're so far away from the rest of the world and the price differences are comparably greater! Wish you luck!

So I've been debating this decision as well, as I really want to do waterslide decals, but thinking if it's worth avoiding all the sealing and stuff... I tried some injet waterslide decals with no joy, so I got some laser 105gsm white sticker sheets and some clear sticker sheets (not sure of thickness, but definitely thicker than the white sticker sheet. I found the colours printed out much clearer on the white sticker sheet and the clear sticker still suffered from the transparency issues I had with the inket waterslide decals (see below) The lighter colour obviously worked better on the yellow torsos, but not by much, I got a similar result with the waterslide decals as I did with the clear stickers below: on yellow and below, on brown: exactly the same colours... I think the end result for the stickers was quite good, and if cut properly, could be quite effective, but as was already mentioned, they're a bit sensitive to being handled, especially if you have it close to the edge, it can fray a bit, and also during the application of my first few stickers, I had cut it out and had some difficulty removing the backing, until I figured out to cut all but one side, leaving me extra space to remove the backing and then trim it off once removed. Also with stickers, it's usually a case of "once it's on, it's on" as then trying to remove it will damage the sticker paper, even if using tweezers, can leave some indents, whereas waterslide decals can be moved around to be placed much easier... All in all, I'm definitely going to stick with the stickers (bad pun intended) when I replicate my Republic Gunship sticker sheet that I need to create to replace the deteriorated stickers from the pieces, and on a Laser printer as I found my home inkjet printer wasn't up to the task on waterslide decals and don't hold improved hope for stickers (but the work Laser printer works a treat! :) ) but I think for these figures, I'm going to put in the extra effort to go the white waterslide decal route...

Just wanted to say a huge thanks for this tutorial, it was a huge help... I was familiar enough with Illustrator to know that I didn't know enough, so this really made things much easier :)

Hi all, First time poster, first time customiser here with a water slide decal specific question, hoping i have enough detail and not going over older stuff, I can't seem to find anything that mimics my problems and hoping that someone will read and go "well, that's just because of XYZ!" (I'm a glass half full person, obviously! :) ) So I'm making custom basketball singlets for a bunch of players from our Australian national league, nothing official, just trying to combine my two bigger passions, so I bought my injet water slide decal paper, followed the awesome Adobe Illustrator tutorial, did a couple of test prints on normal paper, but each time, some of the non-black colours came out very dotty, like there wasn't enough ink. I bought new colour and black inks, and still have this problem, so I thought I'd just bite the bullet and do a print on the water slide decal paper, with mixed results... the blotchiness here is not jpg compression, unfortunately... Would anyone be able to hazard a guess as to whether this would be caused by poor water slide decal paper (it's definitely for inkjet) or just because it's a crap printer that can't mix the colours properly (I'm trying to match up to lego specific colours)? I've watched heaps of tutorials and they all seem to come out really well, but I'm assuming this is because they're printed on a laser printer, as when I print on normal paper on the work Laser printer, they come out much richer and "thicker" if that makes sense? Perhaps it's because of it being clear water slide decal paper? I coated it 3 times after printing with the right spray and the colour doesn't run, but when I've tried placing them on the minifig, orange and purple based ones on yellow torsos and a green one on a dark brown torso, they were still too transparent... Is this a common thing with clear decals and I should be using white ones? That would sort of makes sense, as the below is the sheet that I need to print out, and white is fairly common among them all... so I can just crop them close and it should all be fine on white? Sorry for the long winded post, I'm just trying to figure out if the problem I'm having will either be fixed by using white base decals, or a laser printer or both? I've read that dark colours on dark pieces aren't good for transparent, but with needing to do several figures for African-American players, I sort of want to use the brown torsos to get a more authentic feel... I've gotten some good traction with the pre-decal shots of the figures (using the normal paper laser printed ones blu-tacked to the figures with the right hair, etc) from the players themselves as well as their fans and I really don't want to let anyone down with doing a poor print job... Any paper and/or printer help if applicable would be very much greatly appreciated :)