Tips For Doing Sublimation – Creating Round 2 inch disks and Full Coverage Images

Tips For Doing Sublimation

This is a preprint of a 2002 article I did.

Multiple Plate Layouts

One of the most common uses for doing sublimation is to produce metal plates. Whether they are round, rectangle, black or full colour the technique for doing these is the same. Lets say for this example that we are producing a number of round 2-inch plates. We want to do a multiple in Corel so that we can produce a number of the plates at once.

Our first step is to go into CorelDraw (7, 8 or 9) and produce a master 2-inch disk on our 8.5 by 11 plate. First we will draw a circle see figure 1. To do this we need to select the circle tool. It is located on the toolbox at the left. To make a perfect circle we hold down the “shift key and drag the mouse to create the circle. Actually for this example make the disk size 2.01 inches (make sure the circle is selected before you type the number in the red box area of figure 2). After  you created the circle move it so that it is close to the top left corner of the page but not right at the corner.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Next create your image in side the circle. (For file size I will leave out the image so pretend it is there). Next we will duplicate this image across the page. To do this we need to indicate the distance for the circle to move. We will choose a 2.5-inch distance. We do this by deselecting the round circle and typing in our 2.5-inch distance in the tool bar for the x direction and 0 for the y direction – see figure 3 or Tools|Options|Edit|Duplicate.

Figure 3

The next step is to select the circle. Then hold down the “crtl” key and the “d” key together (depress the ctrl key first and while holding it down press the “d” key) – this will duplicate the image as many times as you press the “d” key in the horizontal . The circles move in a left to right direction. Finish off the row.

Now deselect the circles. Go back to the previous step where we changed the duplicate distance or go Tools|Options|Edit|Duplicate.  Next type in 0 for the x direction and –2.5 for the y direction. See figure 4.

Figure 4

Now select the 3 circles by pressing the “crtl” and “a” together or drag select. Now holding down the “crtl” key and the “d” key you will duplicate the circles down (this is why we use the minus 2.5). You should now have a setup as per figure 5. The Figure 6 is a completed sheet that we did for samples.

FIgure 5

Figure 6

Now you can print your image out. Figure 6 shows us a print out.

Next you will place your paper down and place you disks on the paper as per figure 7. The black circles help us line up the disks perfectly. We make the black circles a little bigger so that the lines do not sublimate on the disks and it allows us to align our disks to our printed images.

Next we place the paper down so that that the disks are facing up with the paper down. See figure 8.

Now press the disks with a light pressure and a temperature of 350 for 45 seconds to a minute. Make sure you take off the plastic coating on the disks.

Figure 7

Figure 8

For items such as coasters or plaques you may want to set up your marks as per figure 9. Again these marks are outside the actual dimensions of the product.

Figure 9

Tip number 2 – Working with a full coverage image.

The next tip involves the technique of covering a product with a full colour image. For this image we will use a door hanger.

First we need to create our artwork in CorelDraw. We will use the hot hanger artwork. See figure 10

Figure 10

The idea here is that the hanger should be a little bit smaller than the artwork. For Actual sizes of all the Unisub product see the UniSub web site and download the image.

Now Print out the image and place the Unisub hanger on top of the picture as per the  item in figure 11 The insert image in Figure 11 shows us that the printed image is actually bigger than the hanger itself.

Figure 11

When you lay out the hanger on the image you see a little part of the image protruding out past the hanger. This will allow the sublimation to sublimate right to the edge of the hanger and means there will be no white edges.

The next two pictures show a couple of more examples that we have done. The first one is a coaster the other is a clock – both have full coverage. The light spots have been sublimated. The darker spots have not.

Figure 12

Figure 13