Creating a File
To create the decal you have to first pick one or more pictures off the internet, in my case, I used just one to create my final project. In Illustrator, you have to size the image you picked and then choose the image trace, I chose 6 colors, and went into the trace setting and bumped it down to 5. After the image trace is what you like, expand it so there are paths and anchors. From there, anything else you do is based on preference, for my stack of books, the colors from the 2 bottom books were also on the top book so I had to get rid of that and move around the paths and anchors until I liked what it looked like. The last thing you have to do is separate the image(s) onto different artboards, based on what you want to be the same color of vinyl.
My Trainwreck Journey
In order to make a file that works, you have to find an image off the internet that will meet your needs. I went through 2 separate images before I got one that I made work. My first idea, I thought was pretty clever, I had recently heard the song Material Girl by Madonna, so I thought hey what about Virtual World Virtual Girl, because everything seems to be virtual now. I really liked the computer with the earth so I tried to make it work, but I couldn't figure it out, so I found another earth clip art, and pretty much the same thing happened. The Virtual World thing was pretty much my only idea, so I wasn't all that sad that it didn't work out, I was actually pretty happy once I had moved on to the books. As I was playing around with the anchors and paths on the books, I figured out how I would have made the earth images work, because I ended up having to delete, move and create some anchors to fill in a few spaces.
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What I Learned
I think the biggest thing I learned from this project was how to manipulate the anchors in a vector image to get the shape that I want. If I had figured that out before I got to my last image, I would have been able to use any of the 3 images that I tried, and it would have been a lot less stressful. I did have quite the time brainstorming and sorting through ideas that I knew wouldn't work to find one that did. I also learned that I need to pay more attention when I am weeding the vinyl and there are small pieces, because you can see in the picture with the finished decal, that there are 2 small yellow spots where I accidentally weeded pieces that I needed.