Introduction: Some background and why I brought this product

So as I wrote about in my Procrastination Knight blog, I needed to get some transfers done. After trying the DIY kits at home and failing hard, I put out the bat signal (I begged, but in a cool way, the discord for ideas) Booley responded that Bedlam Creations where cool, good and where not producing ‘questionable’ custom content.

With this in mind I fired off an email with a .psd and a general spiel what I wanted to do.

I received a pretty prompt reply from Josh and he set to work translating my amaature hour stuff low dpi into something workable, requesting source images and colour values. About 6 weeks later and boom:

Ta-Da. Well it was whole but guess who was the dumb idiot that didn’t take a picture of it before cutting it up.

Thiiiiiiiis guy.

So what do I think about them. Well I’m going to breakdown talking about this thing into Cost, Time, Effectiveness, Cool Factor, then at the end I’ll debut my glorious ratings system.

Cost:

$53.00 USD with setup and shipping to Australia included. I suspect it would have been $5~10 cheaper for someone not halfway around the world.

In comparison GW charges $20 USD ($24 AUD) plus postage for their knight transfer sheet. So we are looking at roughly double the cost, however the GW ones aren’t potentially one off custom jobs. If I wanted to order the sheet again I would guess that I would dodge the $10 USD setup cost which was worth its double its weight in gold.

I also attempted to go DIY with my home inkjet printer and ended up wasting about $30 AUD on paper and god only knows how much on ink for a nil result. You may have slightly better success with a high quality colour laser but based on my research you would still be limited with some colours (i.e white) being extremely hard to do.

Overall I would say the price point is pretty good. It is highly competitive with DIY options and provides something that the OEM can’t.

Time:

Time is a pretty big deal for a custom product.

You need to balance out getting a quality item with getting something rushed.

I submitted my quote request on the 10th of September and received the product mid-late November ish for around a 60~70 day request to receive turnaround time. I think I ended up sending about 3~4 emails for setup, 2 or so for proofs and then about 3 to 5 to get order updates. This was the worst part of the process and you may argue that a near two and a half month time from ordering to receiving is a bit poor, however I would ask you to consider the following:

What you supply may require heavy rework, this takes time.

You are not the only job in the creators que.

On that point, most of these guys aren’t doing this for a primary job.

For me personally I had a large shipping distance to content with.

As I was saying, this was the weakest point in otherwise very strong Bedlam Creations product, however I wouldn’t worry about it too much, Josh was fairly quick to communicate and assure me everything was on track. If you run into something similar I’ve found setting a fair deadline internally and staying in weekly comms works pretty well. Further reorders should be considerably faster. hat said, if you are preparing an army for a tourney or need this service for a business project then you may want to consider requesting Josh for a quicker turnaround in exchange for more vastly dollars spent or a higher initial quantity on the order.

Effectiveness:

The product is professionally presented, shipped securely and packaged with well written detailed instructions and highly suggested items to improve its usefulness (micro sol and micro set).

This is what it looks like on the model, after using micro sol/set and GW varnish alongside GW transfers. I was looking for a product that would be seamless with the OEM transfers and I can safely say that Josh hit this expectation.

Let’s have a really unflattering to my brushwork close up of the transfer.

So there are some white bits and a slight purple discolouration under light. However this was easy fixed with the Vallejo red that I used as a hex value for the quote psd I sent though. Yes, Josh is that bloody good that he can colour match your paint if you give him the correct colour reference! See below for the example that took less than 5 seconds to fix:

He also did fine and finicky white text pretty damn well.

All in all the product is good, on par with GW transfers and is extremely effective. I did have a slight issue with the larger ones falling to bits but I would put that down to my newbie-ness with transfers rather than a product error.

Cool Factor:

Mate I just emailed a guy a trillion kilometers away with my fanfiction Imperial Knight household and now I have near or dead on GW quality transfers for them.

Yeah. This is pretty damn cool.

Rating:

This is a system I just totally didn’t make up.

Here are the 4 possible ratings in the Cost O-effectiveness D-time A-cool-factor system:

Holy shit you need this in your life.

This is the rating I give something totally life changing, like finding out your friend you have known for 20 years can secretly backflip like a ninja, a good Aaron Dembski-Bowden book or the holy grail of plastic kits, Jes Goodwin’s 1998 space marine combat squad. Note that this rating much like a lifetime of happiness is all but unobtainable.

It’s good boss. You will not regret buying this.

These items are extremely effective, well costed and take a reasonable amount of time to deliver their value. They are also pretty cool. A good example of this is the Metallica album that isn’t your fave but you still turn up anyway because it’s pretty damn good, eating a really satisfying sandwich or the Citadel XS Artificer Layer brush.

If you have no other option, then sure.

When you have to buy the thing to do another thing, but secretly know you don’t want to. These items have major issues in one or two areas but are redeemed by having no direct competitors, sheer availability or excelling in some metrics. This is like the brand of instant coffee you don’t like, the feeling and odd relief of a moderately bad sneeze or Catachan Imperial Guard Infantry Kit (by today’s standards btw)

It. Must. Die.

This is the pineapple on pizza rating. It is considered dogshit in all of the C.O.D.A metrics. Examples of this is pineapple on pizza because seriously who does that (a total sociopathic monster, that’s who), that feeling you get when you want to pat a dog but can’t or the Dreadknight.

So with that in mind I rate Bedlam Creations Custom Decals:

It’s good boss. You will not regret buying this.

Cost:

$$ but reasonable. Will be hopefully cheaper on reorders. Which I will be doing if I’m silly enough to do more knights.

Time:

A fairly long wait but reasonable considering the quality product on offer and the effort Josh puts into his products.

Effectiveness:

Extremely good but let down by some tiny, minor, easy as hell to fix by the end user errors.

Cool Factor:

Off the fuckin chart. People with fan created or hard to find chapters/knights etc need to get onto this product asap.

You can find Bedlam Creations here: https://www.bedlamcreations.com/