Step 4Drawing the mask

Before continuing, scrub your board with the scouring pad until its shiny. It's also a good idea to clean the board with acetone and kitchen wipes. Don't use the same dirty spot to clean your board. Try to avoid touching the copper surface of the board from this point onwards.

Start by drawing all the pads with the permanent marker. Simply draw a circle around each hole on the board. Try not too oversize your pads as you'll need to heat up more copper area later when you solder. On the other hand, don't be stingy either as too small a pad may cause the entire copper pad to rip straight off after you solder it.

Follow your mirrored design and draw the lines to connect your pads together. You can use different tip sizes but I only use one. Its a good idea to start in the middle of the board and go outwards so that you are less likely to smudge the ink.

If you screw up at any point, use the acetone to wipe away all the ink and start drawing from scratch. Unless it's a really minor error, its usually difficult to just "erase" the error as you're more likely to smudge the ink everywhere.

You could optionally draw/fill out all the empty copper areas so that you have less to etch. You can even use it as a ground plane. I didn't because my permanent marker was running dry and there was no need for a ground plane in my simple circuit.

Let the ink dry. I am very conservative and I like to leave it for 15 to 30 minutes just to be sure. You can probably use this time to double check everything.