I had a job for a series of commercial installation that I worked pre-press for, but I was not the original artist. The target wall I was working with was 96′ to 106′ wide, depending on which site. After we had installed several of these murals, I got a call from my installer asking:
Hey, why is there a map of the state of Florida here in the middle of this panel? It doesn’t look right.
What had happened, was that the original artist was also working on a project for a retirement village is his home state of Florida. He had accidentally copy-pasted this map locating the retirement village into my mural graphic. The map size, when printed, was about 4′ by 4′. I didn’t catch it because when I was working on the whole mural with 20 layers at 100′ wide, I didn’t even notice this out of place element.
What to do with errors on a wallcovering mural
I had to deal with a quanity of four 16′ errors on four differently sized murals. I had to reprint each one individually. Because of the size of the files, I did not save the fully layered Photoshop files, but only the flattened files. This was a problem.
What I did
- I open the original layered monstrosity, and then added a new layer consisting of a 20′ section of the previously printed design. Thankfully they both have the same color profiles.
- I aligned the layered components around the 20′ section until they matched.
- I eliminated the 20′ section, leaving the layered components in the right areas.
- I cropped the image down to a manageable 54″ section (54″ is a standard panel width for wallcovering, and it also manages to cover 4′ of image, plus plenty of bleed)
- I had the section reprinted. And the new installation WITH the existing install was no big deal. I had a professional wallcovering installer splice the new and old together with a custom double cut splice. He used an adhesive lovingly referred to as VOV, or Vinyl On Vinyl (adhesive) to make all of the new and old edges stay put.
But what about color matching?
Now, although I matched the color profiles of the files, that does NOT mean that the final output will match. We have several issues to get past: Ink variations, print head temperature, humidity, and of course substrate batch color/texture.
Thankfully, for my situation, the wall mural had so many colors and so much visual noise, any color discrepancy did not matter. If it DID make a difference, I would have had to have reprinted the entire mural.
Size Errors
Not all errors have to do with design. Sometimes the mural is just too large, or too small.
- If it’s too large, hopefully you can just re-crop at the installation site. I’ve had experience cropping off 10 feet of mural height with decent success.
- If it’s too small, you will likely be adding more image – consider all of your Photoshop/Illustrator options here- image mirroring, color fades, adding noise, duplicating elements. Installing extra width or height can be handled as mentioned above.
Do you have any war stories of design or size issues? Leave me a comment, or email me and I’ll post them.
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