Plastic electronic materials and high resolution printing methods may be important technologies for new classes of consumer electronic devices that are lightweight, mechanically flexible and bendable, and which can cover large areas at low cost. This paper summarizes some of our recent work in this area. It focuses on the materials and patterning techniques that we used to produce plastic active matrix backplane circuits for a type of paperlike display. It also presents some strategies for encapsulating and enhancing the bendablity of these devices.