Anyone else doing all their color work with SVG decals instead of hand painting?

I've been on the decals-first side of this for a while now and I don't feel like I gave anything up. My hands just aren't steady enought for brush work anyway, I tried painting a badge on a faceplate for a clock project last spring and the edges came out wobbly no matter how slow I went. With the SVG route I take a logo I drew in Inkscape, export it, drop it on the face, and it lands clean the first time. That's the difference for me, not artistic purity, just getting a result that doesn't look like a kid did it. The paint surviving mesh fixes is the real kicker though. I've had two prints where I had to patch the model after slicing showed a gap, and the colors stayed where I put them. Before this workflow I woud have just restarted the whole paint job.

Where I still reach for the brush is anything that needs to look uneven on purpose, like rust spots or worn edges on a prop. Decals are too tidy for that. But for panels, labels, flat art, symbols on enclosures, I'm all in.

I did try a sticker on a curved surface once to see what would happen and it stretched wierd at the corners, so flat or gently curved surfaces only for me so far. On a flat phone stand I made recently it printed crisp with no bleed between colors.

I'm still on the brush side of this, mostly because of the kind of models I make. I do a lot of terrain pieces and weathered props for tabletop stuff, and that look comes from layering translucent strokes and letting colors bleed into each other. An SVG decal gives you a hard-edged shape sitting on the surface, wich is perfect for logos and panels but not for grime, rust streaks, or anything organic. When I tried flat color blocks on a ruined wall piece the print came out looking like a sticker sheet instead of somthing aged. The other thing nobody talks about enough is color count. Multi-filament prints get slower and more wasteful with every color you assign, so I started capping myself around three or four. Beyond that the purge towers eat half a spool. With a brush I can do a dozen shades on one model and the print itself stays single material, which also means it keeps full strength when I want it tough enough to get handled at the table. I do see the appeal for crisp work though. I made a trade sign last month with clean lettering and hand painting the letters nearly broke me. If NeotkoCM had been around then I'd have used the SVG route for the text and brushed everything else after. So maybe it's not either or, it's knowing which parts of a model deserve which tool. Flat geometry and sharp shapes go to decals, everything with texture and wear stays under my brush.

First post here so hope I'm doing this right. I mostly print functional stuff like brackets and storage boxes, never thought about painting at all til I saw this. The idea of putting a label or a color band on a box lid without any extra steps sounds handy for keeping the garage organized. My question is dumber though, does the SVG thing need the file to be a certain kind of clean? I drew one little arrow in a free app and it had these doubled lines everywhere when I tried something similar in another tool, took ages to fix. Wondering if there's a trick to prepping the file before dropping it in.

I'm somewhere in the middle I guess. I use decals for the fiddly bits like tiny text and eyes, then go over the rest with the brush for shading. Never thought to check if the two play nice togehter though, like if I brush paint first and drop a decal after, does it stick where I put it or drift around? Also curious about stacking them, two SVGs overlapping each other on the same face. Haven't been brave enough to try that yet.

One thing I learned the hard way with the SVG route is that the file itself matters more than I expected. My first attempt used a logo with thick strokes and open corners, and the decal came out as hollow outlines instead of the solid shape I wanted. Converting everything to a closed filled path before importing fixed it completley. Now I flatten and expand every SVG in my editor first, which sounds fussy but takes two minutes and saves a reprint. Also worth checking your layer count before you get carried away, since each color on a decal eats into how many filaments you have left for the rest of the model, and I ran out on a four color sign last month.

Been printing since the single-extruder days where your only option was a filament swap mid-print and praying the layers lined up. Before that it was blue tape, an X-Acto knife, and model paint after the fact. So yeah, I'll take dropping a shape on a face and calling it done. The part I want to know more about is how deep the color goes. Does a decal sit on just the outer shell or does it go down a few layers? I've had surface-only paint jobs sand right off when I cleaned up a brim, so that's the first thing I check now.