Projects

How To Make A Wall Decal

January 19, 2010
Jellyfish Vinyl Decals

I get questions about the process of making wall decals all the time via my decal shop. So, I thought I’d just make a quick overview.

Anatomy of a wall decal:

Sketchbook drawing

I make my designs from scratch. Rough ideas start out in a sketchbook.
Jellyfish Wall Decal Sketch

Ink Drawings

I like to have a few different versions of each design to work with. These sketches are pretty rough, but they show the basic next step – which is a cleaned up ink drawing.
Jellyfish Wall Decal 2

Vectorized

The drawings are then scanned into the computer and traced in Adobe Illustrator. Final design tweaks happen at this point. This is the file that will be used to cut the decals.
Making Wall Decals 3

Final work

Final designs for wall decals are usually a simplified version of the original drawings. At this point the designs are sized and grouped to fit either a laptop decal or wall graphic set. Decals are all die cut from rolls of vinyl when orders are placed & I do all of the production work in house.
Jellyfish Vinyl Decals

I work pretty heavily with vector graphics because they can scale to any size without affecting the artwork and designs are easily tweaked to create new projects. This is a small piece of a digital art print entitled Grape Jelly. I created this from a few of the original jellyfish sketches.
Grape Jelly Fish Digital Art Print

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