I've been wanting for a while now to print some bgs for my shelves (don't want to repeat ones I have already bought from Toy Hax), but have no idea which type of paper to use, etc. Anybody with tips?
Short answer: Heavy cardstock. Long answer: You may want to take a thumb drive with the files to a FedEx Office or a local print shop and talk to someone.
Yeah the bigger the figure the more difficult and expensive it becomes to print and ship, and function as a stand. For instance Unicron would no doubt squash anything not made of solid plastic, lol Hmmm but I wonder if there are ways around that? As you said earlier, the idea of a flat poster which could be put behind him? I still haven't sourced any card for these projects (despite calling in at a local packaging manufacturer). But I'm now imagining some sort of 3D card display: flat starfield background behind (featuring that Unicron logo off the box?) with a pop-up style flat Cybertron landscape piece to arrange in the foreground... Yeah if you're wanting something huge your best bet is to go to a print shop. But if you have a printer and you only need smallish (A4*) backgrounds, well most printers can at least handle thin printable card which will prop up nicely. Some struggle with thick cardstock (eg printers that bend the paper around a roller as they print) but an easy way around that is to print onto some nice paper then spraymount that onto the cardstock. If you are printing backdrops yourself, the only thing you really need to avoid is using regular copier paper, as it will lose detail due to the colours bleeding into the surface and just come out really muddy and unclear looking. Get some photo paper. Over the years I've home printed art projects on many different photo paper types and most will get a decent result. Bear in mind the more glossy the paper the more light it will reflect, so if it's going onto a well-lit shelf pick something like semi-gloss. Thickness of the paper is up to you and what your printer can handle. The only ones I actively avoid are the papers that describe themselves as 'canvas' because it does literally have an uneven texture. *also remember you can join together multiple A4 sheets yourself and it probably won't be noticable from a distance (especially with figures in front), to save the hassle of going to get a larger print done specially.
Thank you so much for the contributions to this thread! I've been living "bin life" all this time, but eventually I will have a bad ass display with these printouts:
Hey everyone! I just found this thread and it's amazing. Here's my tweaked version of the Ark, wide-stitched backdrop. I started from scratch with the two original images (big thanks, OptimusTimelord!). Dropbox - ARKEXT_WORK_WIDE.jpg - Simplify your life The biggest changes I made were: - Boosting the sky color to something more vibrant and patching in more cloud wisps. - Added a warm glow to the Ark entrance. I think it helps sell that there's some life or activity happening in there. - I color-corrected all elements of the right-most image to better match the left so it should look, tonally, like one cohesive work. - I painted out the background buildings on the right image. I felt it just looked cleaner. - And finally, I spent a lot of time on the center seam; extending the desert floor in a way that looks more organic, detailed and less like just blurry color merging the two sides. Hope you guys dig the variation
Very well done, looks like a single seamless image I still regularly see my version of the Ark pic popping up as background in advertising and promotional pics (easily identifiable by my changes to the entrance), nice to know it's still popular
Couple of beach scenes from 'Masquerade' that were requested, hope these are of use, @AndyPurro ! First one is really just a single shot with moving cel Cons removed. Second one is a panning shot which has had a bit of tweaking done to remove Warpath's blasting effects and the Cons in background too.
How about some G1 backdrops of the Cybertron city? Do you have the high resolution image to be printed? I want to print those for the background for my shelves...✌️ I want to unbox my transformers and just having them loose... I dislike some of the boxes not showing much of the figures...
Do you mean Autobot City, or just Cybertron in general? Most of the images I've posted in this thread have already been upscaled from their dvd-resolution origins, so are about as good as you're going to get (you can of course enlarge the dimensions yourself to whatever is required, but you'd just be making the same picture bigger rather than creating extra detail). As @Wh33l JcK showed with his photos a few posts ago, you can still get good results. That first panoramic Cybertron landscape might be what you're after? Hasbro's modern boxes are nice (and I love their little diorama stands) but you're right that displaying them boxed isn't ideal. I think there's scope for doing something much more creative on a shelf, specifically with all the SS 86 movie figures I amassed last year, and I have an idea for a project but I'm not sure if I'll ever get round to making my crazy ideas a reality...
Are you able to so anything with the space scenes around Unicron? I'm thinking something like this scene where Megatron and the seekers and insecticons are floating to him I'm after doing a 270 degree wraparound image for planet mode, and whilst I could look for 'stars' or 'universe' images, something from TFTM would be so much better!
I'm referring to those panoramic in your second post at the beginning of this thread in which you show several pictures autobot city in Cybertron... I contacted a diorama seller on eBay that have very nice panoramic on earth, pretty much the first pictures you posted but he doesn't have any from Cybertron to print for me and he was asking me for high resolution so he can print them without pixelation... You can find him very easily on eBay by just typing Transformers Diorama...
Hmmm, wraparound, interesting idea! I was playing around with the idea of a SS 86 style display for Unicron earlier in the thread, perhaps I should have another think. If I was going to pick a space background from the movie, it would definitely have to be something you can't mistake for a generic starfield type thing. Probably the opening shot actually, IIRC that has a lot of colour and vibrancy to it...
There's that too! Basically something that's from his scenes. I've got him on an enclosed shelf, so I intend to do all 5 internal surfaces...
Oh wow, dude is literally just selling my screen grabs as diorama backdrops It's almost a shame they're of a lower quality (if I redid them from the Movie Blu-ray they'd be much sharper). He's clearly nicked the ones he's selling from this thread though, so no reason he couldn't also print whichever Cybertron one you asked for? (fwiw I've never considered any of these images as mine: even though I've done some work to present them to look their best, they are all Hasbro/Sunbow's stuff at the end of the day. The High-res Ark/desert ones are the ones I've messed with enough to feel some slight irritation seeing them being sold, but really it's not as if I have any copyright case or anything). 5 surfaces? What's your shelf? Mine is five too as it's a corner unit (would be 7 if I counted the roof and floor!).
So since I have to bring those pictures to a place that prints (plotter) bigger images, example 13" tall and 23" or more long, then instead of going to a Staples or a graphic design place, I prefer to relay on this seller on eBay. I will quote him on regards of the resolution: "Thanks for the links. So I looked at the Cybertron photos- they are really low rez, & I looked at them in my photo editor, & they are really blurry/pixelated, & would be really noticeable blown up. So if there were much higher rez & clearer versions of these, Id make em in a heart beat". So there you have it, more resolution is need it for those Cybertron panoramic pictures...
I'm afraid that's nonsense, all the pictures are captured from the same DVD source, so if he's happy to sell this Ark/mountain scene for example... ...stretched and distorted so that it's even fuzzier than my original, then he's perfectly able to use the Cybertron shots which are from the same source (and in fact are panoramic composites, so contain more information as they are several frames joined together).
