Thursday, July 10, 2014

Artwork for Pedals

I learned how to screen print out of necessity for my desire to clone pedals. However now getting into designing the graphics on the pedals I want to build, I've found that it has come in quite handy.  Also it makes putting images on shirts a lot easier than stenciling. So if you want your pedals to look interesting, coming up with the artwork and applying it to the enclosure is an excellent way to go about doing that.  There are different ways to get your labels onto a pedal. So far I've seen the following:
1.) Sharpie
2.) Label Maker
3.) Water slide stickers
4.) Hand painting
5.) Screen Printing
6.) Etching
Any of these above methods works, and they all have great potential to look really cool.  Screen printing is just what I've been doing and it happens to work out great.  There are some freeware available out there that would work great for creating the graphics you need. GIMP is one such program, I've been meaning to learn how to use it, in due time. Basically it's a comparable alternative to Adobe Photoshop.

  What I've been using is Microsoft Powerpoint.  It's familiar, simple to use, and create most shapes that you want, with some work on layering I've been able to mimic the abilities of other more notable programs.  In addition to this, most people have access to powerpoint, and if not OpenOffice is another open source alternative.  The great thing about powerpoint is that you can scale the images to the size that you want, usually you can get the color of the paint you'll be using.

Maybe at some point I'll do a video tutorial on it.  But in the meantime here are the tentative images I'm thinking on putting on my pedals.
I'm still trying to decide how I want the black stripe to look on the right hand side.  Whether or not to have a stripe or just the images. Luckily the only thing left is figuring out the placement of the DPDT switches.  Otherwise this pedal is pretty much good to go.

Overall I'm satisfied with the look of this pedal, however I'm just not sure about the clipping options.I was thinking about having a switch to have either some germanium diodes clipping the signal, or an LED clipping the signal.  I'll have to test it out but I think that it's feasible.  There will be a lot of room in this enclosure so I have the option of changing a lot about this pedal. 

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