It's all there, but to summarise, there are several means to creating a livery (i.e. stripes/colour blocks as well as sponsor logos) at home, all of them are going to mean using some sort of graphics program (I use Paint Shop Pro 5 as it was free with something, fairly powerful but still easy to use) to either manipulate found images or create you own ... and once you've done that, you have a choice of media to make the images physical:
- paint
- clear transfer paper
- white transfer paper
- clear inkjet vinyl
- white inkjet vinyl
- self adhesive vinyl (in many colours) - self cut
(.. and if you want to spend more money & learn another software package, self adhesive vinyl again - but cut on a vinyl cutter/plotter).
... but bear in mind there is no way of creating fine white on clear print at home; white against a coloured background is always a compromise, and some colours on clear just don't work against some paint colours.
The alternative is to find a printer willing to print stuff (including white on clear) for you - but there are many problems there (finding someone willing to do it at all, the cost, probably having to go through a number of iterations to get it right, etc).
Going back to home methods, tell me what you want to achieve & I can tell you how doable I think it is& permutation of media I would use to do it ... The older the livery, probably the easier it would be. For example, my St Michael "Racing Cars" book has a 1984 Marlboro McLaren MP4/2B on the cover, that's a pretty iconic car to me so I'll go with that:
- main body colour (white) & angled colour sections (red): paint, with careful masking.
- Marlboro, Saima, Shell (text), Goodyear, Boss (+ driver name): find logos (or close matching font) on internet & resize/redraw/ whatever, all black print on clear transfer paper OR clear inkjet vinyl (have to try both & see which works best);
- small Marlboro red flash on side, emergency cutoff markers, Shell (shell), driver nationality flag, number on nose: - all coloured prints on clear xfter or vinyl - some will take a bit of experimenting as the colours will probably have to be artificially darkened;
- "Saima" on wind deflector & rear wing ends, number on wing: these are problematic - you can print them as the background colour on white media & see how well they work (my thought, not very), I'd probably omit the text & use self adhesive vinyl in two layer to just recreate the number.
I guess that is quite an easy one in hindsight, looking through the book as a whole I'd estimate that out of the 75 cars in there, 45 are doable at home with little to no compromise, and 30 are somewhere between "needing significant compromise" and "forget it" (mostly white sponsors on blue paint).
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