Where to get full colour with white printing on clear

[Platypus]

Has anyone ever found a print shop that will print white ink/toner onto a clear sticker? I've asked a few places and they all said no.
Official LEGO sets do this all the time for stickers. Even torso prints on a dark torso for light colours, with the white as an undercoat.

I would be looking for 1 to three letter size sheets, just for a bunch of small stickers.

REPLIES FROM WHATSAPP:
Dawn P: Check with @Robin Sather He has someone he likes and you can ask about the white

Snowy: it seems like in the lego train world, everyone gets decals made by OKBrickworks. They may be a good place to start. It seems they are reachable on Facebook.

Me: OKBrickWorks advertises white on clear in the first line under services.
https://business.facebook.com/pg/OKBric ... e_internal

Cool. Local might be better/easier. I'm only looking for 1 to 3 sheets.

[Platypus]

WhatApp
Robin: Rapid Copy and Print in Abbotsford. Ask for Danielle.
They've done all the BrickCan badge, award, and trophy brick printing for the past few years. UV printing, not engraving. [including white ink]

[Platypus]

Emailed Rapid and they don't do white ink.

Emailed Second City on Venables (here inEast Van) and they do.
"We do have clear adhesive vinyl sticker and we are able to print spot white in places needed as you requested.
We have a 4sq/ft minimum as this material is printed off a roll and not sheets. White ink does up the costs on the prints. TOTAL: $90.81 (TAX INCLUDED)

More than I wanted to spend. Anyone have anything they want on clear vinyl? I only need maybe about 1sf.

[Andrew]

Could they do a couple of different logo's on the sheet,if so I might be interested.Maybe the VLC logo and Canadian Pacific.Do they have to be adhesive?,I like the idea of the sticker they put on your car window to remind you of your oil change,they peel off your window,they stay in place,they can be removed and used for something else.

Thanks David
from Andrew R

[Platypus]

The product I'm going for is the adhesive clear vinyl. They have other products, but each thing they run would be subject to the same minimum batch size on the material.
The printer that runs the clear vinyl is 4 feet wide and prints onto a roll of material. Once they get the machine going, they want to run a minimum of 1 foot on the roll.
This machine prints a relatively low DPI of 150, This is because it's meant for large things like signs, but I think 150DPI is good enough for our stickers, because they are not going to be inspected up close, they are just little details on vehicles and such.

So yes, I can add any items that you want. VLC logo, CP rail, etc.

[D_R_Watson]

I want some details and logo's for my LRT moc's, so I would be in for sharing a print, however I have no idea how you do the design work for them. I have photos of what I want, but how do you translate that to a drawing and scale it? At the moment I don't have access to a computer that can run any design software. If we are allowed back into the office I might be able to come up with some thing in inDesign.

What sort of timing are you thinking?

[Platypus]

I'm thinking to print in the next month. So first or second week of July. I could do it in the next week, but I think it makes sense to give people more time.

Do you have a picture of what you want? If it's a straight on photo of the decorated area, I can just delete the surrounding in photoshop and then print whats left.

[Platypus]

As for where to start. I go two distinctly different ways, that sometimes cross.
DRAWING from scratch
I usually go this rough and use adobe illustrator to create vector based files for lines, text, angles, curves, etc.

PHOTOS and Photoshop
Sometimes I start with an image, like a logo or unusual shape and then edit it and print from there. Example below. Daniel asked me to print the logos on the side of this tram. So this is step one, skewing the image in photoshop to ward the dimension that it will need to fill. This is bordering not worth it, as it might be better to redraw the curves as a vector, but it's an example.

[Platypus]

I will be putting the oder in around July 3rd, so You'll have 10 days to decide if you want something.

Daniel asked me about cost. Think of it this way. 144 square inches for $23, so what you can fit in 1x5 inches for $1.

[Platypus]

Re: Formatting

If it's a logo send it to me with at least 150 DPI and include the witch that you need it to print at. for enable "make this 1 inch wide" or "print at 4 studs wide" or "4 bricks tall".
Vector files are also welcome. Send it as a PDF or or AI file backward compatible to Illustrator CS5 (cause that's what I'm using). Other vector formats should work too.

[Arrow]

Cool, if you wouldn't mind adding this file to the sticker sheet.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XQGUCK ... sp=sharing

[Platypus]

Colours! Sean had questions.

The vinyl is clear, because that's why I'm at this printer, to save on the trouble of cutting stuff out, and make finer shoes possible and stable.

The White underlay is the tricky part that most print shops won't do. It's a plain white, "5th colour" of sorts. It will be allied to the area I specify, which unless we make an exception will be all the print areas. So are area that shows blue on the sticker will get white first and then blue. While Blue doesn't really need it, it's best to have it. If the sticker goes on red, the blue would come out looking purple if it didn't have the undercout. This is because CMYK "full colour" digital printing is just a mix of tiny dots on paper/vinyl. Light blue and dark blue are the same ink, just with a less or more dots/drops/toner pellets. So the lighter the colour, the more the background shows through. On white paper this makes colours evenly lighter. On clear stickers, this would make the coloured area show varying degrees of background.

So all printed area will be white undercoated, unless I remove the undercoat from the file on purpose. If you know your sticker is only going on white lego, you may want to take this option. It might look cleaner, the sticker will be a little smoother and I't possible that the wear/durability will be better, but I don't. This is an experiment.


All other areas will be clear, to whoever degree the vinyl is altually clear. You can always just cut the clear away, but on a large sticker with lots of little lines, like Daniel's trolly above, this would be super hard and annoying, and make the tiny stickers almost impossible to place well.