I was hoping someone with experience doing this would be able to give so tips, such as the best brands of decal paper, best program to use to print out the jpeg filed and such.
Thanks on advance.
I have printed decals, using laser printer friendly decal sheets from Micromark (not sure of the brand, but that was the source.) I used Adobe Illustrator to design, and lay out the decals, which worked out very well, but had a bit of a learning curve.
Over-all, I am pretty happy with my results, but there are a few pit falls:
1. 8.5xll US letter sheets are pretty expensive, so you may not want to follow this path unless you have enough work planned out to fill more than half a sheet. (That takes a *lot* of tiny BT-scale decals)
2. Print resolution becomes a major issue at very small sizes. My printer just barely makes it to proper BT scale, but I could use higher resolution to do the really fine work.
3. It pays to spray-seal the decal sheet, like you would a mini. The toner can be rubbed off fairly easily if you handle the sheet too much, which isn't a big deal when it's hot off the printer, but, as mentioned, the sheets tend to be very big, and have a lot of content, so I try to keep them for future work.
4. If you want to print light colors, you need to get a sheet with a white, rather than clear backing. Light color toner isn't opaque, and won't show up properly on a dark paint scheme. (Alternately, paint a white patch on the mini, and paste a clear decal on that.) In both cases, you will probably need to clean up the paint job around the edges of the decal.
I hope that was helpful, and not scary. I'm happy with my results, but I want to pass on my "lessons learned". Good luck!
