I’ve worked on art projects in the past that have included digitally printed prints cut from and laid over another substrate or hidden image. Those were cool, but I must say, the concept outlined over at LimitedHype.com from burojet.com is really something.

They’ve used digitally printed murals of unique furniture, but have not been scared to cut them to pieces, and overlay them onto moveable doors.

Obviously these are tailored for those with small living spaces, but the concept in relation to division and revelation of new layers is exciting.

At Lateral Art, we’ve had the opportunity to work with custom cutting houses that cut Aluminum Letters, Sintra, and of course digitally printed items out for us.

What about two layers of murals, one cut to pieces with an intricate pattern, revealing the other behind, but 6 to 12 inches away. As the visitor walks from one viewpoint to the next, the back/revealed image keeps changing. Kind of like a massive lenticular.

We’re up to that challenge, we only need that target wall. Do you have a good application?

In the mural business, we often check out what other people are doing.  I found this great bird cage mural in a restaurant.  The simple lines add uniformity and really fill the wide open space, and they also do well to the open rafters/faux rafters up above.

One thing to note – the decorator for this project was thinking ahead in his or her combination of the mural with the well matched chosen lighting.  It’s not a trivial task to line up mural positions with other wall objects.  One has to pay particular attention to HOW the installer deals with the bleed of the mural.

If 6″ of bleed was provided here in the install, but the installer just lined the left hand edge of the mural with the left hand edge of the bleed, the entire mural could be off by 6″ away from any electrical junction boxes.  A critical error.  It’s very important to clarify to an installer HOW to deal with provided bleed, and HOW to deal with other objects.

I’ve recently come across a fun new tool from the design professionals at Adobe. It’s Kuler.

Kuler is an online respository of color themes that are sorted and voted on – a little Web 2.0 community for color enthusiasts. We’ve utilizied this tool when creating new murals, and are happy to use it again based on client request.

This tool is excellent for pulling up new ideas for mural use, as well as other A&D and printing projects, however one has to be cautioned that the colors here are not necessarily printable. Some colors are outside of the printing capability of many wide format printers. Color problems often occur with very light colors, very dark colors, greens, oranges, and flourescents/neons.

You will impress your client if you can speak their language – speak about expectations for the target wall before the mural is installed.  To speak intelligently about this concept, refer to the guidelines that I have referenced below.

The below list is a creation from several associations, including: the Association of Wall and Ceiling Industries International (AWCI), the Ceilings and Interior Systems Construction Association (CISCA), the Gypsum Association (GA), and the Painting and Decorating Contractors of America (PDCA).

(Levels 1-2 omitted due to irrelevance in this discussion) Read the rest of this entry »

When you follow these three basic rules to collage design, you will provide your clients with decent looking images.

Consistency

Resolution Consistency

A collage can look extremely inconsistent if you utilize source images with varying resolutions.  Mismatched cropping techniques can yield a similar unfortunate effect.  It’s best to match resolution whenever possible.  If this cannot be done, consider the unthinkable and downgrade your highest resolution image to the lower common resolution, and then enlarge (interpolate) all of the images up to the desired resolution together.  I use Genuine Fractals for my interpolation needs – expect a  review of that product within this blog within the next few months. Read the rest of this entry »

Wallcovering installations are created with a 1″ overlap between 54″ ( or less) wallcovering panels.  A double cut (through both panel edges) is applied with a simple knife cut through the verical lenght of the matched panels.

This double cut method provides a seam with no overlaps – crucial with thick materials.

Because this is how installers always install wallcovering, make sure your printing/panelization software is set to include a 1″ overlap between panels.

One more comment -With any seam, it is possible that the raw vinyl color (white) will show through.   A wise wallcovering installer will carry with him touchup markers for cleaning up any ‘bad’ seams.

A good set of wallcovering mural installations can be found here, at the OMNOVA website.

In today’s greening world, you have options on what substrates you target for your wallcovering applications.

Vinyl Wallcovering, types I and II

I’ve had the privilege to visit two of the largest vinyl wallcovering manufacturing sites in North America in Columbus, MS and Marietta, OH.  These being home to OMNOVA Solutions, and RJF International, respectively.  Manufacturing is a difficult process, and getting it right is an artform. Read the rest of this entry »

Color, Color, Color

As mentioned in previous posts, Interior Designers have a specific level of expectations when it comes to color matching as compared to the print professional.  Color match is usually done with a Pantone book, a hard match, fabric samples, tile samples, etc…. Custom mixed spot colors for everything.  As you and I know, this is NOT the case for the digital printer utilizing a  4, 6, 8, or even 10 color printing system.

Unfortunately, as a print professional, it is required that you help your client understand why certain colors can be matched, and why, certain colors, cannot. Read the rest of this entry »

Not the actual mural, ha ha

I had a job for a series of commercial installation that I worked pre-press for, but I was not the original artist.  The target wall I was working with was 96′ to 106′ wide, depending on which site.  After we had installed several of these murals, I got a call from my installer asking:

Hey, why is there a map of the state of Florida here in the middle of this panel?  It doesn’t look right.

What had happened, was that the original artist was also working on a project for a retirement village is his home state of Florida.  He had accidentally copy-pasted this map locating the retirement village into my mural graphic.  The map size, when printed, was about 4′ by 4′.   I didn’t catch it because when I was working on the whole mural with 20 layers at 100′ wide, I didn’t even notice this out of place element.

What to do with errors on a wallcovering mural

I had to deal with a quanity of four 16′ errors on four differently sized murals.  I had to reprint each one individually.  Because of the size of the files, I did not save the fully layered Photoshop files, but only the flattened files.  This was a problem.

What I did

1. I open the original layered monstrosity, and then added a new layer consisting of a 20′ section of the previously printed design.  Thankfully they both have the same color profiles.
2. I aligned the layered components around the 20′ section until they matched.
3. I eliminated the 20′ section, leaving the layered components in the right areas.
4. I cropped the image down to a manageable 54″ section (54″ is a standard panel width for wallcovering, and it also manages to cover 4′ of image, plus plenty of bleed)
5. I had the section reprinted.  And the new installation WITH the existing install was no big deal.  I had a professional wallcovering installer splice the new and old together with a custom double cut splice.  He used an adhesive lovingly referred to as VOV, or Vinyl On Vinyl (adhesive) to make all of the new and old edges stay put.

But what about color matching?

Now, although I matched the color profiles of the files, that does NOT mean that the final output will match.  We have several issues to get past: Ink variations, print head temperature, humidity, and of course substrate batch color/texture.

Thankfully, for my situation, the wall mural had so many colors and so much visual noise, any color discrepancy did not matter.  If it DID make a difference, I would have had to have reprinted the entire mural.

Size Errors

Not all errors have to do with design.  Sometimes the mural is just too large, or too small.

• If it’s too large, hopefully you can just re-crop at the installation site.  I’ve had experience cropping off 10 feet of mural height with decent success.
• If it’s too small, you will likely be adding more image – consider all of your Photoshop/Illustrator options here- image mirroring, color fades, adding noise, duplicating elements.  Installing extra width or height can be handled as mentioned above.

Do you have any war stories of design or size issues?  Leave me a comment, or email me and I’ll post them.

Why do you need bleed?

A wall out of square requires BLEED to make it fit.

Besides errors in drawings and errors in measurements, the biggest reason to include enough bleed in a wallcovering or wallpaper mural is the plumb of the walls.  A plumb line is a metal bobber on the end of a string.  If you were to hold the end of the string in the top left corner of the target wall, and the bobber at the bottom of the target wall is 3″ in from the edge- your wall is 3″ out of plumb.  This can happen on ANY edge of the wall, so we need to compensate for it.  Bleed is necessary to cover these discrepancies.

What I am getting at here, is that sometimes square walls aren’t square, and rectangular walls aren’t rectangular.  The bottom of a flat wall might be longer than the top, or the right taller than the left.

So How much Bleed is necessary?

Below is a short list of maximum wall dimensions compared to a suggested amount of bleed to be added to EACH edge of the design to be printed.

• <8′ ……….1″ each side
• <20′ …2″-3″ each side
• <50′ …5″-6″ each side
• <100′ ….12″ each side