Large planar surfaces, such as windows, doors, walls, cars, semis, vans, and buses, are often used by businesses as an advertisement or decorative medium. These large planar surfaces may contain images of decorations, current prices, products, company names, phone numbers, and other information relevant to customers. Some of this information is prone to frequent changes. Thus, many of the advertisements and decorations are temporary, intended for a short term sale or event, or as a seasonal decoration.
Images on large planar surfaces may be hand-drawn, meaning that a person directly applies paint or other colorant to the surface. However, hand-drawing an image on a large surface can be time consuming. The quality of the image is limited by the artistic abilities of the person drawing the image, and obtaining a skilled artist to draw the image is often expensive, and, for a temporary image, impractical. Furthermore, if the image becomes damaged or needs to be changed, the same artist may be needed to repair the image. If the same artist is unavailable, the image may be of poor quality after the image is repaired or modified.
Images on large planar surfaces may also be printed by a printer. Because the surface is too large and rigid to be fed through a printer, the image is first printed on a sheet of vinyl or plastic by a conventional inkjet or xerographic printing process. The sheet is then attached to the vehicle, window, or other large planar surface with adhesives for display. Application of the sheet, however, can be labor intensive to ensure that no defects are generated in the image placement. Furthermore, modifications or repairs of the printed image are not possible without replacing the entire image. Therefore improved image generation on large planar surfaces is desired.