The Addams Family Pinball

Having ruined my new apron (see post from April) I have decided to attempt to repair the screen printing which I damaged. In order to do this, I’m going to use waterslide decals, which can be printed on my inkjet printer. I’m sure that I could use an easier solution (such as the stick on decals which are available – and which I already have) but having seen such decals live, I hate the way they look. Take a look at this picture, for example:

Just look at those stick on decals and those edges – yuck!

As I intend to use the waterslide decal on just the Addams Family lettering, I need to match both the purple and white colours. So back to my colour grids from last month. The first thing I noticed was that the purple colour appeared to be a mixture of just cyan and mauve. So I printed a grid of cyan versus mauve with 0% yellow:

From this, I decide that the best match was with 100% Mauve and 65% Cyan, however the colour was not quite right, so I printed a new colour grid with 100% Mauve and 65% Cyan as the base colour, with different shades of yellow (0 to 40%) and black (0 to 19%):

From this grid (yes the colours are all different), I selected the 30% yellow and 5% black option. Now onto white.

For white, I assumed that the white colour had been discoloured due to the black gloss paint under the screen print and due to a “yellowing” with age. So I printed out a grid of yellow versus black – and got some great colours of gold but nothing like the colour I was after. So I took a photo of the apron with white printer paper on it (yes, I used the printer paper with “golden” colour grid):

I then adjusted the levels of this photo to get a part of the white paper near to the “white” on the apron to have a white CMYK value (all 0%) and then measured the CMYK value of the apron “white” close to my “true white” spot:

The value I finished off with for the “white” was Cyan=40%; Magenta=20%; Yellow=35%; Black=0%.

Having printed this out, I still wasn’t happy with either colours so fine-tuned them:

I finished choosing the following colours:

Purple: Cyan=64%; Magenta=100%; Yellow=30%; Black=5%
White: Cyan=40%; Magenta=20%; Yellow=35%; Black=24%

Which resulted in the following decals:

Now these may look strange, but I cut out The Addams Family logo from the paper and tried it out “in situ” on the actual apron (by simply placing it over the current logo):

Not bad! Although I will have to wait until I print the logo onto the waterslide decal paper to see whether I need any further adjustments.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 5th, 2009 at 19h19 and is filed under TAF. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.