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Making your own decals on a computer and printing them off on decal paper is a thing, right? Anyone have any preferred brand or type of decal printer paper or a place to get it? Suggestions on good methods of making them?

http://fromthewarp.blogspot.com/2012/05/how-to-make-waterslide-transfers-decals.html?m=1

That should answer just about any question you have. Enjoy.

That fairly well covers the basics, I would add a couple of points though.

One of the problems with printing your own decals at home is dealing with things like white or metallic. Since printers are generally designed to print on white paper - they don't have a need to print in white, and very light colors like crèmes tend to rely on the white of the paper to achieve their color.

You can work around this by painting the area which you plan on applying the decal to white to begin with, using white decal paper or by using stencils to paint white on the decal paper before or after you print. An airbrush and a good quality flat white paint along with the properly shaped stencils can be a wonderful thing for the home decal maker.

Along the same lines - you can actually use metallic paints on decal paper to do some more complicated designs. I have sheets of 1/48 scale officer ranks in silver and brass/gold metallic that I created at home using a stencil sheet I cut on a Silhouette SD and metallic paints in my airbrush.

You can also do things like freehand banners and what not easier on a flat sheet and then transfer them to the miniatures banner, vehicles for nose art and the like. Because the paper is basically just a thin film on top of a backing sheet - you can paint and draw on them...and provided you have properly sealed them, any marks you put on will be just as permanent as printed items.

The third thing is that if you plan on doing an icon that will be in a lot of sizes (or even if not...as the results tend to be better) use an SVG file format as opposed to a rasterized file format. You can create your own or convert them using vector software like Adobe Illustrator or open source packages like Inkscape. The benefit of an SVG format is that no matter how much you shrink it down or scale it up - there is no change. Images are stored in terms of shapes and vector lines as opposed to pixels. Since you will want to print at the highest resolution you can manage for the best results - even a relatively high resolution file snagged off the web can end up being spotty.