Drawing up artwork for custom Photo etch?

[Chuckt5]

Ok, so I'm trying to make up some custom photo etch parts and the first step is for me to do up the artwork. I'm sure the answer is obvious to everyone else, but for some reason I can't figure out how to go about drawing the artwork and getting it to the final size I need.

Would the following set up steps be the right way go about it, or is there more to it?:

-research the part you need and do a rough drawing of its shape and with final etched size
-scale up your drawing and design the shape using a 2D drawing program
-scale down your drawing to its final size and print off a test print to confirm the dimensions are correct
-make any adjustments as needed and finalize your drawings
-print artwork to clear film for use in photo etch process

Does this sound about right, or am I missing something important?

[uncletony]

I draw everything in final output scale. Resizing as you suggest seems bound to introduce errors somewhere in the process.

I use Adobe Illustrator which is very good with precise tolerances and will zoom up to 1600% which is plenty big for any detail that PE can reproduce.

I have developed a workflow for creating this kind of art in AI; not all of it is completely obvious. Mastery of the alignment tools is one of the important tricks; another is understanding how to expand strokes of specific width to create various offsets.

[Chuckt5]

Kind of sounds like I need to get my hands dirty and start drawing. Thanks for the tip about using the zoom, I was not thinking that.

[Chuckt5]

I draw everything in final output scale. Resizing as you suggest seems bound to introduce errors somewhere in the process.

I use Adobe Illustrator which is very good with precise tolerances and will zoom up to 1600% which is plenty big for any detail that PE can reproduce.

I have developed a workflow for creating this kind of art in AI; not all of it is completely obvious. Mastery of the alignment tools is one of the important tricks; another is understanding how to expand strokes of specific width to create various offsets.

So I've tried my hand at doing up some artwork and for the most part, so far so good. Where I'm stuck is drawing the artwork for use with a negative photo resist film. I'm kind of stumpt on how to do this.

Do I draw my parts in red on a white back ground, change the background to black, then change the red parts to white, or is there a better way?