Scottish Elises

Hey Guys,

Thought I'd share some of my first attempts at some stickers. A friend and I acquired a wide carriage cutter a wee while ago but we've only just recently had time to get it up and running and produce some examples. Even though it'll do 1.2m wide cuts, it's actually pretty good at small stuff too.

The pics show the stickers in place on my Elise's back window. Unfortunately due to my black/Titatium theme and being in the garage, they're not massively visible so I put a towel behind them to give some contrast. All the stickers (obviously excluding the TutTowers one which is one of BobVanM's) have been generated completely from scratch as vectors. We're quite proud of the results.

The ring sticker is great, there are loads of people that have them on their motors, should have your version

Cool.


Loving the ring sticker. I passed some generic box the other day and spied the ring sticker on the back - thought that was quite cool - pulled along side for a wave and a smile, only to discover it was being driven by two very old people; I cannot believe they drove the ring - it must be a gag of some sort, or their grandchildren borrowed the car and took it to the ring without telling them

Cheers,
Robin

Haven't some of our very own old people been at the Ring?

Great effort Ferg- could be a market for those!

Fantastic Ferg! They look great! I'll need to get back in the lotus fold to get some off you lol!

Looks good I have an Alfördring sticker on the back of the elise which is something different.

robin wrote:Cool.


Loving the ring sticker. I passed some generic box the other day and spied the ring sticker on the back - thought that was quite cool - pulled along side for a wave and a smile, only to discover it was being driven by two very old people; I cannot believe they drove the ring - it must be a gag of some sort, or their grandchildren borrowed the car and took it to the ring without telling them

Cheers,
Robin

Neverbeen

Edit to say, My stupidity comes from being at work and unable to see most photo hosting sites and hence can't see Fergs originals. Just checked on my phone and realised his is is a neverbeen anyway

I like the idea of incorporating the road in the logo, could be a cool way of making up stickers for Borders runs / 070809 type events...

Chris

I'd seen the "neverbeen" elsewhere but I wanted to do a sticker that exactly matches the official sticker (took ages to find someone who'd posted a hi-res picture of the back of their car so I could trace it! ) I've done the proper 'Nurburgring' text too, but obviously I'm not fit to adorn the car with it....yet.

I spoke to my partner in wine and we reckon £2 to cover costs etc would be ok for the road based stickers if anyone would like one. PM me if you want one. I'm currenlty working on some of the Lotus decals that are hard to get to help out those who have cars but the decals are either no longer available or are very expensive.

111s stickers for the S1 are a small fortune to buy!

What i need for things like that are something like a brochure with the badge on it so I can scan at high res. Hi res pics work but theres more room for error even after passing it through lots of lens and warp corrections. I then trace the image by hand. Using auto trace turns out unpredictable results and almost generates more work in the cleanup. If you find something with it on I'll do the sticker.

Just in case anyone wonders whats involved in generating a sticker from something like a picture, I snapshotted some of the development stages from something I'm doing just now.

In this case I started off with a small gif file (thanks Sanjoy ). It's easier than a photo in some ways as a photo needs manipulated until it looks straight, but with any small image like this, image quality is an issue. So you expand it out to a size that your comfotable working with lines, and then build a frame of guide lines based around the primary lines of the image. Your trying to recover, out of the blurred image, the original structure given to the logo by the designer, not simply copying the points in the image itself as that often gives inaccurate results as it may have been through several conversions that have added error along the way. You've all seen stickers that just aren't consitent in their structure or layout to be convincing as originals, I'm aiming (achieving is something differnt lol ) to make it so you can't tell.

Once you have your framework you can then trace the lines. This just takes a bit of experience to know what kind of line or how to manipulate lines to get them in the right place. You trace the image sticking to your guidelines but using the image as a reference. After the trace you then need to remove the original image and see if it looks "right" on it's own then make some small adjustments to make sure the "rightness" emerges from the trace, always refering back to the graphic.

All told this is about 2 hours work to get it to a state I'm happy with, but this is a basic sticker others take longer, and then do some file translation to make it ready to cut.



edited to correct some dreadful late night spelling...

Wow that's a tad labour intensive but top work Ferg!

Do you use a bézier tool on the curves to get a full vector of the logo ?

Sanjoy wrote:Do you use a bézier tool on the curves to get a full vector of the logo ?

Not sure quite what you mean Sanjoy, but the original Raster image (GIF in this case) has been converted into a completely Vector based image (eg AI or EPS) at the end. When I say trace in the process above, what I'm doing is manually adding lines, some of which will use a bezier type facility to get a curve, to make up a collection of vector lines that make the vector image.