My pride and joy is a 2011 MCSC in spice orange, black and chrome. It looks a lot like this stock photo except mine has black seats. The top is also black. Mine has the sport package with the standard 17" mostly black wheels.



Because spice orange is a new color, these are fairly rare. But like many of you I want a MCSC with a totally unique look.

I bought mine in late November, not too long after Halloween. The association was obvious.



Of course a proper Halloween pumpkin would be converted into Jack-O-Lantern. So I checked out the graphics design firms selling graphics for the MC. There is at least one Halloween theme. But Halloween is seasonal and I didn't want to be one of many or even a few. Besides, I wanted to design and install my own graphics design.

Disclaimer: I am not a professional graphics designer. I've played with tools like Photoshop, Paint and the Microsoft Office Picture Manager. I also have no experience applying graphics to the side of an automobile. So this is amateur hour.

On the other hand, I have good skills with tools and follow instructions fairly well and love to do research. My audio upgrade is going fairly well, but the project is winding down.

https://www.northamericanmotoring.co...m-upgrade.html

Also, I wanted to do something creative and describe step by step what I did and what problems I ran into, just like I'm doing with the audio upgrade.

Raw Materials:

2011 MCSC in burnt orange. This is one hot car, and I've owned a few starting with my first new car, a 1969 GTO. Like many of you the first question I hear from most people is "What kind of gas mileage do you get?" I want the graphics to make a statement, "This MCSC goes like a bat out of hell?" In making that statement I want to capitalize on the Halloween themed colors.

3M Carbon Fiber Vinyl - I am fascinated with this product. There are lots of utube videos on installations. It's expensive but less expensive per square foot than most off-the-shelf graphics. I want my MINI to have one less color - chrome. I've seen blackouts using black 3M carbon fiber. They are cool. But as long as I'm going to use it, I might as well use it for my side graphic.

The Web - this is a great place to do research. If you are lookong for images to use in graphics design, Google Image searches will give you a tremendous array of materials.

Design:

I want this mini to have a sinister look to it, take advantage of the Halloween colors (orange and black after chrome blackout), yet not be seasonal.

Many of you put racing stripes down the bottom of your doors and quarter panels. That got me thinking. I'm a big fan of the Dutch artist MC Escher. If you want to learn a bit, Google his name. One of the things he poineered is transitional designs from simple geographcs to animals and other objects. Here is an example.



Note the transition from various colored hexagons in the middle to bees on one end and lizards on the other. Hmmmm, "What if a racing strip pattern did a transition into bats." There's your "goes like a bat out of hell statement."

So I went out looking for bat templates for halloween cutouts. This is the one I like the best. If I cut out the eyes, the orange from my paint will show through.



Right click and save to the desktop. Bring it into Microsoft Office Picture Manager and use the resize function to scale it into a number of different sizes. Drop the saved output onto Powerpoint Slides and you have this. Numbers are the horizontal pixel count. I actually have three pages of these.



Note that these bats are not symetrical. One wing is longer than the other. I put arrows on each bat to indicate the side of the car they will be placed on from a front orientation. So I grouped the bats on my Powerpoint slide then flipped the image 180 degrees horizontally, and came up with this slide.



3M Carbon Fiber vinyl comes in seven colors. Two are black and pewter (a dark grey)

With two colors I could do something like this.



Note that I won't go direcly from checkmarks to bats. I'll build a number of intermediary images that morph the checkmarks into bats over a series of images. No, I don't plan to use graphics software to build my transition images. If you can't figure it out, ask a four year old. Cut out some bats from a printed piece of paper. Then trim each bat a bit more than the one before it until you have a series that goes from a bat to a checkmark.



Apply the images to the side of a MINI and you will see something like this. The lower bats would be pewter, and the upper bats black. As they move from back to front the black and pewter streams merge to form the racing stripe. I'm giving some thought to a bit of flames coming out of the front wheel well to emphasize the 'hell' side of the image.



I have some Pewter and Black 3M Carbon Fiber vinyl waiting in my living room. Over the next few days I'll start producing the graphic elements. As I do, I'll describe how I did it.

Meanwhile, some feedback and suggestions would be appreciated. Remember, I'm an amateur at installation, just like most of you.

Oh, you might want to take a look at the front of the MINI. I'll bet you can't guess what I plan to do with the front end and hood graphics. Think sinister !!!

 

Nice!!