Home made water-slide transfers

Learning how to make custom decals has been on my to-do list for a while now and after this first go at it, I thought I'd write up my experience.

I had three waterline ship models that had been stalled for a while for lack of suitable transfers.
- A Triang Vanguard that I was upgrading with more realistic gun turrets and paint scheme where the bridge looked too blank without windows.
- A refurbished Triang Varicella that was just lacking the Shell Logo for the funnel.
- A Delphin Canadian Tribal Class DDH that really needed a transfer for the complicated flight deck markings.

I had actually bought a pack of transparent water-slide transfer paper off Amazon a couple of years ago. It cost about £11 for 20 A4 sheets - far more than I expect I will ever need. This had been languishing in a drawer ever since.

Lacking either the software or expertise to use a proper graphics program, I actually prepared the design in Microsoft Excel. The Shell logos and the ship's crest for HMS Vanguard were found online whilst the windows and flight deck markings were drawn using the basic shapes and drawing tools in Excel. After the event, I thought it would have been good to have some little maple leaf emblems for the side of the DDH's hanger and the earlier Shell logo of yellow on red so I added those. I also darkened the windows for Vanguard and adjusted the position of the two either side of the bridge front. The image below shows this later version.

After printing it is necessary to seal the surface with a couple of coats of sprayed on varnish. One problem I was warned about was that this could crack so I made a test with two types of acrylic varnish brushed on thin, clear plastic to check how they coped with bending. I tried Tamiya Gloss and Rowney Galleria Matt. Neither showed any sign of cracking, however much I bent the plastic.

The transfer designs are quite small, even for all three ships, so I cut an A4 sheet in half and even that was enough for 6 copies, with space to spare. The actual printing was done on an ordinary inkjet printer using the best photo settings.

Since I had two varnishes, either of which looked like it would be acceptable, I decided to cut my A5 sheet in two and try both on the real thing. The first coats sprayed on fine with my airbrush, through the slightly gloopy Rowney needed a bit of thinning. After letting that dry overnight, I had a foolish attack of laziness and brushed the second coat on rather than going to the trouble fo getting my airbrush out then having to clean it. Big mistake. As the unevenly applied Rowney varnish dried, it caused a bad crackle effect on many areas. The Tamiya was more forgiving and I thought I had got away with it there. Lesson learned: I've bought a can of spray varnish for next time.

Of course the varnish and base covers the whole sheet so it is necessary to cut out the individual pieces. I used a fresh scalpel blade for this and took great care to avoid cracking or tearing the varnish. 

The two sizes of Shell logo are because I wasn't sure which would look right - it was the smaller one so my final design in the first picture just takes that size. 

Because I used clear paper for all three, I needed to leave the flight deck white so that would show through but you can just see a thin line of green that I painted in below the hanger doors to avoid a white line showing through the finished article.

All the areas where the transfers were to be applied were given a couple of coats of gloss varnish to avoid silvering.

Here are the final results. As mentioned before, I thought the windows for Vanguard were a bit too blue so I've darkened them in case I need to print out any more. I also changed the spacing for the outer pair, as they wrap round onto the angled faces of the tower. This close-up shows some cracks along the top row, on the right - I think this must be down to my applying the second coat of varnish by brush.

I was particularly pleased with the Shell logo. Whilst the extreme enlargements show some speckles of red in the central yellow area, these aren't at all visible to the naked eye. The tiny 'Varicella' name came out well too. This was far too small for even the smallest available font so I wrote it in a small plain font then took a screen clip of that and shrank it down to a suitable size.

The flight deck markings were a bit harder work. My transfer size was slightly off so I had to paint a small area along the stern edge of the deck, having first built up the thickness to avoid a visible step. Although the printed green was a very close match to my Vallejo, it wasn't exact and there was a difference in texture so I painted over most of the green by hand, feathering the edges slightly. With hindsight, it might be worth using a slightly darker colour for the print to that the final painting achieves a slightly colour modulated effect.

I found this a really good learning experience. Although I can see several areas for improvement, the results were better than I expected for a first attempt. I'm quite inspired to make some more and can see lots of things being easy now in 1:1250 that would be quite impossible to paint - ship's crests on my modern RN ships, for a start

Now I've made castings from my own master and transfers from original designs, the next thing I'd like to try is designing photo-etch. For that I really need to master a vector graphics programme - I don't think Excel will be enough for multi-layer photo-etch!