Fantasy Printshop | FP312: USA Insignia 1/32 Backing Patches
Reviewed by Kevin Futter
Fantasy Printshop is a UK-based decal producer that not only sells its own range of decals, but also provides the decals for other manufacturers such as Alley Cat and airscale.
One of the company's specialties is providing a range of utility decals, such as national markings and code lettering. Here we examine a set of two sheets containing white backing decals for US 'stars and bars' insignia. These can be used to provide additional colour density behind translucent kit decals, or where the decal may be applied over strongly contrasting colour demarcations (such as invasion stripes). They're also applicable for use with post-war insignia featuring the additional horizontal red stripe in each 'bar'.
The backing patches are scaled in range from a small 14" to an enormous 43", with at least 4 decals at each size. The decals are labelled with their respective sizes individually. I must confess though that both my camera and my scanner failed miserably to capture usable images of the two sheets. The images below are a poor representation of what the sheets actually look like, unfortunately.
In person the backing decals are very much indeed white, though not brilliantly so. To the naked eye they look as though they might be an off-white, possibly even deliberately so for scale effect, though I don't really know if that would have any affect on an overlying decal.
The decals themselves are very nicely printed, with with minimal carrier film and good colour density. Registration is of course not an issue with a simple, one-colour decal sheet such as this.
This set raises a couple of obvious questions though. Firstly, to what extent will using these decals increase the overall thickness of the complete insignia? This is of course somewhat dependent on the thickness of the overlying decal, but these backing patches appear, to the naked eye, to be reasonably thin themselves, so I suspect the result would acceptable provided subsequent decal layers are themselves not too thick.
The second point is that not all insignia decals are sized and proportioned accurately, and it may be difficult to find an exact match to pair these up with. The implications of a mismatch in size and/or proportions should be self-evident. I suspect that Fantasy Printshop has in fact produced this set of backing patches as a complement to its own range of US national insignia decals (FP712 and FP715). The layout and sizing of these two sets is identical to the set we are examining here, and this would seem to be the safest way to go.
If you're tempted to use them underneath someone else's decals, I would photocopy those decals first, then carefully cut them out and overlay them against these backing decals to check that size and proportions are compatible before using them on your model.
Conclusion
This is another handy utility decal set from Fantasy Printshop, though best used with its own range of US insignia decals.
Thanks to Fantasy Printshop for the review sample. Please see the product page on their website for purchasing information.
© Kevin Futter 2014
This review was published on Tuesday, July 08 2014; Last modified on Tuesday, July 08 2014