So a little post to state where stuff is at, currently. You see, I began doing this little decal venture a while ago to fill up that giant goddamn void on the market, mostly for my own needs and desires but it quickly slammed up into high gear and now I’ve surpassed around the hundred unique creations. The thing is, it kind of has begun feeling… whats the word, official, recently. I dunno if that makes any sense, hell 97% of the time on this website I’m rambling about little cars and how they somehow open the floodgates for me with their past, both in real life and the little plastic counterpart so having this side venture has really given me a deep look into how awesome it can be being part of the bigger machine.
Though it’s left me begging for more nearly all the time, my methods now rely on sending off what I want printed to a company in the United Kingdom that do A4 sized sheets for a specific amount at a time and I must admit, they are a class act; the quality is fuckin’ fantastic. They are friendly, they are consistently working on upgrading their printing capabilities and they now have two sets of different prints, one’s from an Alps which are capable of very tight, blacks, whites and metallics, but color is definitely one of its biggest short-comings, it’s all dot-matrix impact print for the colors where it does its damnest to form solid colors via lines and intensity, rather than pigments. Which, y’know, when those things were new back in the nineties was fantastic. The blacks, whites and metallics like gold and silver are more similar to inkjet from the looks of it as it can do some incredibly sharp and defined lines and shapes.
The other are screenprinted, similar to what Cartograf, Tamiya, etc. do these days, it’s not the best quality for blacks, as it relies on the RGB scale to make black(which to put it bluntly is just “dump all the colors on top of each other and you get black!”), but for colors… Unlike the Alps, which needs individual colors to be read, one at a time, this one acts more like a conventional printer just with whites included(this also means since it needs colors to create black, grays and shades thereof usually get a red hue) so creating things with color is now easier than ever before. Effectively I’ve now hit the point that I split the sheet to have one with metallics, blacks, whites, silver and gold(BWSG) and the rest on the main color(RBG) sheet – the only issue here of course is, I now spend double the money to retain the quality.
Like, I am incredibly satisfied with what I create and I so, so, so fucking hope other folks are too given I put in a stupid amount of passion into these things. But to get my scatterbrain thoughts back on the line, the point I was trying to make is that I rely on a outside source for them and I pony up a lot of my own money to have them printed and it all just takes time. So ungodly much time. I have grown to resent telling people “you gotta wait two weeks cause I’m too poor to constantly invest on a personal basis, so I stack everything into one giant order and have it all done at once“, but unfortunately that’s just how I have to operate for the time being. The downside of just being a dude with Photoshop and a hell of a creative streak, I roll with the changes and fortunately everyone who has put their time, money and hopes in me seem to have kept their patience with my slow-as-sin method.
In the meantime, this decal stuff has slowed down the model building to… well, it ground it to a halt. Hell, in fact it turned me into a very stereotypical model kit enthusiast where I now have literally forty unfinished kits to work on. I got eight car bodies in my living room just sitting, parts of three different makes of Firebird from three different model kit manufacturers(MPC, AMT Ertl and Monogram) scattered around my living room, half-finished ideas planted in piles on random objects like the ’96 Impala SS Grand Sport I’m trying to make is just sitting half-done on a pile of sprues on the table, the ’84 Dodge Daytona sits painted and half ready on a pile for two months now, got thirty five boxes stacked up behind the couch and more coming. A backlog so big that I genuinely think I’ll ever finish in this lifetime. And I keep buying more, these days more to create a decal sheet for it(like the Pontiac Ventura, Pontiac Bonneville, all the Firebird kits) and just putting it back in the box and… kind of forgetting about it. In reality, I hope I personally can strike a balance to go back to actually building more model kits rather than adding more and more decal sheets to ’em.
So in a sense, this one’s a bit of a thank you infused with a what-the-hell-goes-on kind of post, given I never ever do blog posts other than ones about the actual models. Excuse my rambling, soon we’re going back to regular programming – the Opel Astra DTM kit is coming up any day now once time permits me to type a little more. And after that, more and more I hope! So yeah, one day this website will go back to pseudo-reviews and lollygagging about model kits and cars soon, I promise!