How To Design Enamel Pins

Designing enamel pins has become incredibly popular with creatives and artists around the world. Whether you're looking to create custom pins for your brand, design custom lapel pins, or develop personalized enamel pins as merchandise, our guide will walk you through the mechanics of designing custom enamel lapel pins properly.

This tutorial is relevant for people that are designing enamel pins, custom enamel pins, and enamel lapel pins:

• using vector or bitmap based art programs like Adobe Illustrator to create custom lapel pins, custom metal lapel pins, and custom enamel lapel pins. [Get Template]

• using traditional art mediums such as pen and ink to create custom made enamel pins
  
  

The important thing to realize is that regardless of how you create art, the factory is going to require a vector file to get enamel pins made. Most suppliers re-draw submitted JPGs or PNGs for free when producing metal pins, metal lapel pins, or metal pins custom. So it depends on how you wish to spend your time when you order custom enamel pins.

Step 1: Pick a Metal Electroplate Colour for Custom Enamel Pins & Enamel Lapel Pins

Start by deciding what colour your metal will be. Every pin has raised areas (metal) and lowered areas that allow for enamel fill. You have to keep the enamel areas separate by using raised metal on metal pins, custom metal lapel pins, and enamel lapel pins.

Most creatives like the black or white dyed metal because it resembles the line colour on most art. It also creates a nice contrast for the enamel fill. Note that dyed metal is only available in the soft enamel pins finish. This is only one of many reasons most designers prefer soft enamel pins when creating custom enamel pins.

What electroplate goes best with your art? If you like black lines, use black dyed nickel in the soft enamel pins finish for your custom soft enamel pins.

Dyed metal is a great option if you require coloured details. Hint: about 75% of pins we sell to artists use dyed metal instead of bronze, silver gold when they order enamel pins from us, including bulk enamel pins and custom enamel pins bulk.

Decide if your fine details are best rendered in gold, silver or bronze. Bronze is an overlooked electroplate that goes really well with turquoise and blues and greens on metal lapel pins.

Consider ditching the enamel all together and going with an antique metal pins custom option or sandblasted finish.

Step 2: Start Big – Designing Custom Lapel Pins & Custom Enamel Lapel Pins

Enamel pins always start with a container or shape for the design. Dynamic shapes look the best as opposed to squares and circles when designing custom lapel pins, custom lapel pins no minimum, or custom lapel pins bulk.

If you are tracing or designing your art from scratch, start with the outside border first for your custom enamel lapel pins.

Create art in layers: Outline, raised metal details and colours for custom enamel, hard enamel pins, or custom hard enamel pins.

In illustrator, we often use pink lines when tracing art. This allows us to see all the areas we have drawn in the event we are tracing over original art for custom enamel pins no minimum orders. You can easily replace the line colour in Illustrator or Photoshop with the "edit colour" command. Or just re-colouring the pink lines when you are done.

This example below shows the first shape we'd make if we were tracing a submitted design for custom enamel lapel pins, custom pins, or personalized enamel pins.

Step 3: Add the Details for Enamel Pins & Personalized Enamel Pins

Start with the easy shapes first. Now that your border is done, direct your efforts towards smaller details and shapes for enamel pins, custom enamel pins, and hard enamel pins. You may need to overlap lines. Don't worry about perfect alignment. We clean it up later by thickening the metal lines and masking out the rough edges on metal pins.

Remember, your shape has to be 2mm at scale in order to hold colour. Just trace the shapes for now. We'll colour them in later. At that time we can make some of the smaller areas raised metal on custom metal lapel pins.

Don't get too hung up on a perfect trace if you are using the bezier tool in Photoshop or Illustrator. You are crafting metal lines that will be stamped in zinc alloy for enamel lapel pins. It's a fairly crude resolution by the time you shrink your design down to actual, especially for detailed enamel lapel pins and custom enamel pins bulk.

Identify which areas of your pin are raised metal. Identify details and accents that should be metal and trace them for metal lapel pins. Use our cheat sheet to snag the metal and enamel colour chips and create a colour palette to assign a colour. Just use flat colours..no gradients.

Once you have completed your trace, proceed to Step 4 below.

  Step 4: Scaling to Actual Size & Assigning Colour for Custom Enamel Pins

Load your Pantone coated colour book in Illustrator or Photoshop and create colour swatches out of your preferred colours for custom enamel pins, custom enamel, and personalized enamel pins. Select colours from the actual Pantone book, not your monitor!

Use eyedropper tool to assign colours.

Create a box at your desired size. Copy and paste your art into the box. Make sure your Adobe Illustrator Preferences are set to "Scale Line Widths".

At actual size, use the 2mm dot to determine if your coloured areas meet minimum for your personalized enamel pins design, whether you’re producing custom lapel pins, custom enamel pins no minimum, or bulk lapel pins.

Change small enamel areas to raised metal.

Print your design at actual size before submitting to a factory or pin seller. If parts of your design are muddy or complex, you won't get better results if we manufacture it that way. This step is crucial whether you're creating custom pins for personal use or preparing to order enamel pins, order custom enamel pins, or produce bulk enamel pins.

Step 5: Get Feedback Before You Order Enamel Pins

Do you want some feedback? If you want me to check it and provide a private screencast for your custom enamel lapel pins design, custom enamel pins, or custom made enamel pins, feel free to reach out.

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