Our task for this project was to design a decal in three colors that would be cut out of vinyl. We designed it using Illustrator, but we sent it to the vinyl cutter rather than the laser, much like the decal of our name for our designer notebooks.
This one was much easier to decide what I wanted to do. There's a Twenty One Pilots song on the new album that came out in October 2018 called Chlorine, and the video for it just recently came out. In the video there's a cute little creature by the name of Ned (left), and I knew instantly that I wanted to do my decal design (right) based of off him.
I didn't want my design to be too big, as I was putting it on a sketchbook with lots of other stickers. I created a new 5" by 5" page in Illustrator.
I added the image simply using copy and paste.
Next I traced the outlines to make a vector image. I clicked through each trace option to find the one that looked best for what I wanted to accomplish.
There was a white space behind the design that I didn't want there, so I moved it out of the way and deleted it.
For this project, I needed to work in layers of like colors. To do this, I separated each thing individually, starting with the general head shape.
I created a new layer to start. Then I copied the head shape and put it on the new layer, changing the color. I wanted the final cut to be white, but that wouldn't show up in Illustrator so I made it light grey.
Next were the eyes and mouth in black. I did the same thing with the face where I copied them.
I put them on a layer separate from the face, coloring them black.
Next I copied the mouth, but not the tongue.
I put them on teh same layer as the eyes because they would be cut out of one vinyl sheet.
I made the mouth black and made sure it was aligned in the proper spot with the eyes.
This is how it looks altogether at this point. In the upper right are the different layers.
Next was the horns.
I grouped the ears and the tongue together so they would both be the same color.
This is the final Ned.
Next was the words. This was the trickiest part, because I had to select each individual letter.
I put it on it's own layer and made it grey to match the horns.
This is how it all looks put together. I ended up matching the greys of the words, horns, ears, and tongue so that they would all be the same.
Next I uploaded it into the laser cutter (ignore the pop-up).
These were the colors I chose.
I first loaded the white for the face.
Here it is all cut out. I had to scrap the letters because they were so small and complicated that they wouldn't unstick from the transfer tape and kept getting lost or torn. I'm kind of sad about that because I thought they were cool, but they were more trouble than they were worth.
Then I stuck it on my sketchbook, where it will live. It the process of transferring everything, one of the ears tore off.
Overall it was a fun project, but it was a little bit of a hassle to get everything situated correctly. I learned not to make vinyl pieces too small, otherwise it will be really difficult to get them fully incorporated into your final decal.