Lets kick off by stating the obvious, this is an article about the wonderful side venture I got going – making decals for model kits and having them printed by a company nowhere near where I am located. Oh yes, if I’m gonna do it wrong, lets at least do it on a international level. But on a serious note, this simply wouldn’t have been possible without the lovely folks at Rothko & Frost. But as I’ve said before, the way I handle this with the limited resources I have, I’m utterly reliant on them printing my files for me.
Regardless, consider this one a bit of a look at how the whole ordeal is currently going. For starters, I’m currently at give or take 370 planned unique creations, of which around the 200 are currently either finished or in a state of being as good as done. On top of that, give or take 30 are custom works for folks, be it a set of Pro-Stock decals for a ’81 Dodge Omni, a refurbished sheet for old monster trucks, helicopters and Jeeps or simply just air cleaner decals for a AMC AMX. And this is a 10 month adventure so far, I started at the ass-end of November to send files over to the UK and seeing what they looked like on print and… well, at that point I realized, I don’t have to chalk off 1200 bucks for a fuckin’ ALPS printer from nowhere USA that has no guarantee of working, not to mention 200 bucks worth of shipping and imports charges crippling my already feeble income, I can do this at my own pace and earn a little bit of pocket change right from the start instead of paying off a damn printer myself.
So in under a year I’ve made a fair amount of sheets and I’ve grown nowadays to doing maybe one sheet a day, sometimes every two days, just to keep the creative flow going and to keep the growth somewhat constant. It’s 90% pure joyous fun on my part and 10% commissions from people which I do enjoy making, they just come at a slower pace as I’ve forced myself to shape up a sort of “list”, as I call it. Effectively, once I reached the point of having give or take a hundred ideas just bouncing around, I thought I’d write ’em down sequentially and just… go by that. Not exactly the most sexy way of going about it, but it’s just this one guy with a full time job that does this on the side, so it… it kinda keeps all the shit in order, somewhat.
But there may be a change on the horizon, or rather a expansion of sorts. While I’m not gonna change my methods of doing the decals, as long as I don’t have my own printers, this is gonna be the way I operate until either the money runs out on my part, or the company ceases to print for me. The expansion I’m currently working towards is 3D modelling, it seemed like the logical way to go – especially now Revell’s parent company is in the shitter, it just escalated the idea for me that it may be time to start offering some handy-dandy 3D crafted pieces to improve or change up already existing models. No, no, not resin business, God no. That’s a start-up so messy and gargantuan for one guy, especially with stupidly high demands like mine, that would never work unfortunately, so no proper bodies and whatnot, just pieces.
So how far off am I from going into the 3D printed parts market? Well, literally in it as of today. What happened is, well I got my own 3D printer as a birthday gift of all things. I mentioned it once fleetingly and here we are! The thing is getting 3D CAD nailed down again, similar to how I’ve got Photoshop and Illustrator bolted down firmly. So I ain’t gonna start by making anything stupendously difficult, infact the most basic I can think of shape wise and short term on my resin list is the front bumper and side flares for the ’78 Mustang King Cobra and the ’70 Pontiac GTO Judge rear wing. Like I said, I pretty much only want to do quality of life pieces and parts to replace others with, like a ram air Pontiac Firebird Formula hood or an air cleaner for a Dodge 383 V8 block. so forth. Maybe down the line I’ll go deeper, but who knows – for now this is what it’s gonna be.
Hell, maybe I gotta partner with people to make copies of whatever I end up printing, if it’s any good of course. Anyhow, yes – expansion and all that snazz. Keep an eye out for the ever growing list of decals, that ain’t going anywhere.