Vinyl Laptop Sticker Installed

This is a laptop sticker i created to test out some new gold vinyl i picked up from ebay for cheap. Its is a brushed gold look and has a nice finish. unfortunately it does have some wrinkling issues when putting through the vinyl cutter but it can be worked around, kind of, lol. the laptop itself is a charcoal/navy colour and the gold seems quite fitting against it as a contrast.

The character is Chii from the anime series Chobits, it is one of the laptop owners favorite anime characters and they expressed an interest in having a vinyl made up. after scouring the internet for good photos to transform into the laptop vinyl I found this one. it was a complete colour picture and i had a bit of work to do to get it to the sticker stage. the first step was to polarize the image making the dark's darker and the lights lighter. I then went through and removed all the colours leaving only the outline. after this I had to get in there and fix the details which had been removed during the conversion process. doing all this took around 3hrs to complete as it is quite a detailed picture, but the file was complete now to make the vinyl.

Original picture

The cutting process is not that tedious, the computer program is set up, some measurements of the item which will have the vinyl stuck to it so you can adjust the parameters on the cutting program, a few button pushes on the cutter itself and presto she is off and cutting. the hard part is weeding the vinyl once its cut. Weeding is removing the parts of the vinyl sticker which do not need to be there. I would say i spent a good hour weeding this one, its just so intricate and i had to reference the picture quite a bit to make sure i was removing the right parts and not what needed to remain. bleow is a picture of the weeded vinyl before application.

Vinyl Laptop Sticker Weeded On backing Paper

Conclusion

All in all i think the whole thing came together quite well. it was a fun project to do from start to finish. Even though the difficulty of the project was considerably high for what it was, it was an enjoyable exercise and it improved my skills and ability in the field. It was also good to do something more complex than standard sign writing of letters spelling something out. Its definitely something i look forward to doing again when i have the chance.

Vinyl Laptop Sticker Installed