My latest round of micro scale SP decals blend in perfectly with the background decal paper making it hard to see what I’m cutting out. Here’s a tip, using a red headlamp makes the letters stand out from the page. It made the process much less frustrating.
Neat! I just gave it a try and it works! My traditional approach has been to turn the workbench lamp toward me and use it to backlight the sheet. This renders the tiny white decals readable, but then I have to remember where the one I want is when I put the sheet back down to cut it .
If you have bright lights over your workbench, you may have to shut them off so they don’t wash out the red light. I have 5000k LEDs and I have to shut them down while cutting under the red light.
That is a very clever tip. I was thinking back some 45 years when few decals were available in N Scale, so alphabet sheets were often a solution. Faced with having to cut out letters to spell S U S Q U E H A N N A , I wrote a computer program for the fun of it that worked to count how many of each letter needed to be cut out of a sheet. I wished I still had that computer when years later I had to cut out letters to spell C o l u m b i a N e w b e r r y a n d L a u r e n s ....... twice!
I haven't had to do it yet, but I've heard of people coloring the back of the sheet with a black marker also
I've done this with a black Sharpie to better see really tiny white decals. It works quite well, but I'm uncertain what this may do to the decals over time as the marker appears to soak into the backing paper some.
