A Quartet of Randomness.

Some prices I don’t think I’ve shown here before. These all have in common that they were experiments, early in my custom making journey.

For a long time, I didn’t have any way of making decals or water slide transfers that were complicated or wrapped the entire casting. I’ve since found ways to make white backed water slides, which let me make much more complex decals, but back when these were made about all I could do is find overly complicated ways to make water slides appear bright and colorful on dark surfaces.

So, you’ll see that most of the see are a combination of painted flames and small livery or sponsor decals. A few reasons for both, the flames were made by making and using flame templates cut from vinyl. I’ve had a vinyl cutter/plotter for years (the original is still clinking along). But about all I could do for water slide decals, like the sponsee decals, was to make small decals on white backed water slides that sort of matched the paint color of the car.

This simple way of dealing with graphics works great with rectangular or simple graphics, but not so great for complex graphics where the decals need to match the contours of the car or where paint shows through portions of the graphics. For that I needed a white ink printer and a whole lot more practice with matching the decals to the contours of the car.

So these stick around as an examples of simplistic times, when I was thrilled with anything that was new or turned out surprisingly well. Most pieces from this era are long gone, these remain as I like how they turned out…even though it was mostly accidental.