October 13, 2012

Evangelion Mini Cooper S Clubman

Yesterday the Evangelion Mini Cooper S Clubman was born. For the past several months I'd been planning to turn my new car into an 痛車 or a car with fan images on it. I'd already been gradually leaning towards Neon Genesis Evangelion with my iPod case and a small sticker I purchased off eBay a while back. I was originally planning to order the stickers from Japan, but that fell through and I was able to find a great local company, Mission City Signs, who could print for a comparable price as well as professionally apply the stickers onto the car. I still have tire air valve caps and license bolts on order, but those are minor details.

Making the images took quite a bit of time, and taxed my iMac for the first time since I last did some serious graphic design work. The images needed to be high quality actual size at 150dpi for a good print result. It took me a while to find source images large enough to work with, and there wasn't a lot of images that large. Luckily the recent Evangelion reboot has come with some excellent high quality artwork. I needed to extract Asuka, Rei, and Mari from the background and then composite them actual size onto an actual size image of my Mini. I would say doing all this took at least a couple dozen hours. The resulting source and final image files take up about 2.8GB and prompted me to ensure I was using GigE for my network connection.

I'm super happy with the results! There are a few blemishes in the application but they're only noticeable up close. From start to finish, this project took me about two months of research and work. The stickers should last about 5 years, maybe longer if I keep my car out of the sun and away from harsh weather.

Posted by josuah at 10:24 PM UTC+00:00 | Comments (1) | TrackBack