Printing Onto Drafting Film With an Inkjet Printer

One of the beauties of mat drafting film is that it can be printed on with an ordinary inkjet printer. The surface of the film has been treated so it can accept a wide variety of media including pen, marker pencil and printer ink.

There are however a few things you should keep in mind when printing onto this type of film.

Although the surface of the drafting film accepts ink very well, some pooling of the ink can occur on the surface of the film if the ink load is too high. When this happens, you can get some smears of ink on the film as it comes out of the printer.

You can avoid ink pooling by following a few rules of thumb.
Make sure that your artwork is made up of thin lines.
Don't attempt to print large areas of solid black.

Print in "Economy Mode". this will yield lighter but still very visible lines to follow when cutting the stencil. You will find "economy mode" somewhere in your printers dialogue box.

Vector software such as Corel Draw or Illustrator are excellent tools for creating suitably thin line work for stencil design.

Avoid placing more than one sheet of film in the printers paper tray at one time. Sometimes, and with some printers there will be a tendency for the printer to suck up two sheets of film at a time instead of one.

Dislodging stencil film from a printer is sometimes a hell of a lot harder than removing jammed paper, believe me.

Although printer ink will dry nicely onto the drafting film, the dry ink sits on top of the film and the image can still be rubbed off or smeared with your hand.

To avoid rubbing off the image while you are cutting the stencil, work with the printed side facing down so your hand is rubbing against the non printed side.

I recommend printing the word "UP" somewhere on one corner of the design so you will know.