If you want to customize your car, adding window decals can be an easy and quick way to personalize its appearance. You can also do decals and clings at home for adorning your windows. The hiccup is, installing custom decals can be a little pricey.
If you’ve budget constraints, you can make them yourself. If you have a Cricut machine and want to use it to make decals, you need to follow certain instructions.
- You can place a gigantic sticker on your car window or its side panels. A small paper sticker won’t suffice. You need a larger range that pops up. That’s what you get with decals.
- Vinyl is a temporary surface material for creating a decal image. It helps you in transferring a set of letters or graphic to a more permanent and stronger surface, a panel or window.
- Like stickers, vinyl decals are adhesive, but with a more durable and stronger hold.
- If you want to change the decal style, you can swap out or tweak the decals.
A manual mechanism
If you don’t have a vinyl cutter currently, fret not. Just get a few basics right. These are your design, adhesive vinyl, cutting surface, scotch tape, X-acto knife, transfer tape, and scissors and tweezers.
- To prepare the design, you can use a Photoshop software or cut a design from the newspaper or magazine.
- After getting it on a piece of paper, cut the image with a ½ inch margin. You can use it as a template, which holds up to the surface where you stick the decal.
- The right size and placement are important. Take the vinyl and form your design out of it. If you’ve a curly design, you can tape it to the concerned cutting surface to smoothen your job.
- Next, attach the template to the premium vinyl in numerous places. If the design’s middle has a big void, consider cutting a big hole inside and taping the bottom.
- The next step is to cut the design. Depending on its complexity and size, the cutting process might be a little cumbersome. Smaller designs are generally more tedious.
- To cut your design, cut the inner designs and make deep cuts. Consider the thickness of the template and vinyl.
- In the event of any cutting glitch, wait until you can take off the template for rectification.
Walk through a project
One of the simplest ways to make window decals is to use a Silhouette Portrait digital craft cutter. It’s a great machine, which you can buy for $150. The portrait has 8-10 inches of designing and cutting width.
The materials you need are a white craft vinyl, transfer paper, X-acto knife, and a digital image as decal. You can choose white vinyl since solid white and clean window decals are very popular. There’s a wide range of prints and colors available.
You can bring 10 ft rolls for other projects. You can also find single vinyl sheets for small decals or runs/rolls of decals. The studio software is freely downloadable. You can also purchase upgraded tools online.