Starting the house by the roof: Waterslide decals for small scale airplane miniatures part 1: Manufacturers
Piggybacking on my first post lets introduce a few manufacturers of waterslide decals
Well because no miniature is complete without a set of decals, you can go crazy as I do or you can just drop a couple of roundels and insignias here and there.
The BT-1 on my first post has a total of 25 decals on top of it
4 narrow white bands (covering half of the rear fuselage)
6 Big black letters on each side of the fuselage
2 Big white letter on top of the black band
4 small letters on top of the wings
4 medium sized black bands on the wings
As you might imagine not just a single manufacturer was involved in this monstrosity :)
So lets get started, shall we?
My main provider for roundels and random national insignia was Dom from Dom Decal’s (no longer in business)
Unfortunately due to RL issues Dom is no longer in business.
Doms website is pretty spartan but the important stuff are his decals, I came across his range when he just started with the range and he had a wonderful range of actual properly laid out german balkan crosses which were sorely lacking at that time.
Still I think that his german markings are the best out there, I have both the 1/300 (1/285) and 1/600 sheets and they can cover a good range of planes, I have no 1/600 airplanes myself but the 1/600 sheet is quite useful when dealing with airplanes with small wings or narrow fuselages (He 162 I am looking at you!)
Size wise only the biggest planes might not be covered by the three sizes offered on his sheets and by biggest I mean really big boys as the Ar 232, XB-15..ect, The biggest size goes nicely with the usual suspects Ju 88, He 111, Do 17, B-25, B-17, B-24…ect
His range is pretty comprehensive and he also accepts suggestions, he had some really nice generic pinup decals that look great, I cannot see them now in the web but I will drop him an email to see if he still have them around.
Resolution, thickness, color density and transparency are very good now but some of his early sheets were not that good he has improved a lot with time.
The only think he lacks a bit is lettering, he just has USAF, NAVY and MARINES stripes and German squadron marks (with all their funky symbols).
Second on the list is Dave from I-94 enterprises
http://www.i-94enterprises.com/products/decals-setting-solution/
His ranges are broader than Doms but the amount of decals per sheet you get is slightly smaller. His German range for 1/285 is a bit of hit and miss lacking a few of the different balkan cross styles and sizes.
The american range suffers a bit of the same issues as the germans however he has some nice sheets as the US-102 were he covers a lot of different sizes that other manufactures don’t.
He offers nice sheets that cover tail markings and specific squadron markings and he takes into account the actual miniature manufacturer models when designing these decals which is a plus, you can by a decal sheet resting assured that it will fit the mini you want to put the decals in.
He also has a few armor and generic decals and a bit of sci-fi stuff.
But where this range excels is lettering, Dave offers 4 sheets of generic lettering in 4 colors (white, black, red and yellow) and three sizes on every sheet plus specific lettering sheets for the US Army, US Navy, US Air Force and Marine corps (black, white and yellow) and stripe sheets for each of this corps above on several colors (black white and grey so far)
He is my one stop shop for lettering :)
On the technical side his latest decal sheets have improved in resolution and color density (his earliest ones suffered as the doms ones) and they are very good.
One word of warning though, the lettering in red and yellow does not have white backing which means that it is sort of translucent and the color will lose crispness when applied on top of dark colors. A quick workaround is to first lay a white decal of the same type and put the red/yellow one on top.
That is enough for today, next post will cover a couple more of manufacturers and some finishing techniques
