Someone said they wanted a Cricut tutorial, so here goes:
First of all, disclaimer, I do not really want to give Cricut money. This means I'm doing this with the least expensive tools I can find. Literally the only reason I went with Cricut instead of another brand is that Cricut sells the Cricut Joy, which is like $120, making it the cheapest computer cutter out there AFAIK.
One of the parts of the Cricut line that I don't have is a subscription to Cricut Access. Cricut Access is an online library of assets that are all digitized for the Cricut and are ready to use. I didn't get my Cricut to make baby onesies that say "Sorry I made big bad poopoo pants" on them or whatever the cricut wine moms make. I got a Cricut to put my own designs onto stuff.
So, if I'm doing a cricut tutorial, I'm going to start by showing how to make your own designs for the cricut. While this normally requires some kind of digital art software, which is going to get its own tutorial, here's a really fast technique that doesn't require that.
Part 1: draw thing.
Part 2: Using some kind of dark marker to color in your design. You can get more detailed than this. However, make sure that you're keeping in mind that these shapes need to be cut out. You can only get so detailed with this before the machine can't figure out what to do.
Part 3: take advantage of your portable, pocket-sized* image editor. Your phone usually has some kind of image adjusting options. You need the black outline to be as dark as possible, and the white to be as light as possible. First, crop the image so that it is as small as it can possibly be without cutting your design. Then, I started by putting a stark black-and-white filter on it, and then adjusted the sliders until that dark part on the bottom-right corner was gone.
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*okay, depending on your pockets. I have some pants that won't even fit an iphone 4 or a motorolla razr
I've never used the Design Space mobile app, so I just emailed the picture to myself and uploaded it into the desktop version. After repeatedly declining Cricut's offer of a free month of Circut Access and just $9.99 a month after that, we're ready to upload the image.
When the software asks you what kind of image, you hit "simple." Full honesty, I feel like any image that makes you hit anything other than simple probably needs to be reworked on my end before trying to make Design Space understand that.
After you've uploaded it, and declined the offer of a free month of Cricut Access and just $9.99 a month after that, you'll get access to these tools.
If your image is good, you can start by just clicking the magic wand tool into the white areas of your design. This will erase them and make them transparent.
Note: with the way this process works, you don't actually need to fill in the whole of the dark areas, as long as you outline them dark enough and have no gaps. I did it anyway for this design, to make it easier to see the process. However, if you have a more detailed design, you can get sharper lines by just using a 1.0 sized multiliner and leaving your fill-ins blank.
I also went in with the eraser to make sure that the gaps between my pieces were large enough to stop the pieces from touching.
Then, you upload it as a cut-type image, and it'll open in the canvas.
Since we're using the Circut Joy here, I went into the size box in the top right and set the smaller of the two dimensions down to 4.5. 4.5" is the maximum width that the Joy can cut, so this will make the piece cut as large as possible.
Since the Joy can also cut 24" long, you could combine a lot of little designs on the Design Space canvas and make a file for a border print. However, it's probably a better idea to learn the basics of an image editing software and do the combining there; Design Space likes to crash on me if I load too many images into one cut.
Then you just cut it out and stick it on something.
Final notes:
1) This is a really great technique if you know calligraphy, which I do not.
2) Because your lines are not as smooth as a computer-generated one, the blade is going to jitter when it cuts. This is normal and won't her the basic cutting blade. It might really annoy the knife/rotary blade, but I don't know for sure, because I don't have a Maker.
3) A brayer is a useful tool for sticking transfer tape onto your cut vinyl, and for sticking your vinyl onto things. If your local craft store is a Joann, be aware of this:
Cricut products are ineligible for coupons, even when they are no on sale. Mod Podge products have no such restrictions. If your store doesn't have the Mod Podge on in the glue aisle, you can check the scrapbooking section next to all the embossing powder and Zim Holtz stuff.
4) You can totally reuse transfer tape if you're careful.
5) it's pronounced "cricket". If you want to say it wrong, that's your right, but if you're going to rudely "correct" a craft store employee who got trained by the company, and you're wrong, be aware that you WILL be mercilessly mocked by that employee and several of their coworkers in the break room. If you want to be wrong, please be polite.
Okay, so that's your easy shortcut way to digitize without having to learn any software. Stick around for other ways to digitize your stuff, and that tutorial about making border prints with it.
So, as we went with in the last one, anything that's a solid black-and-white image can translate into Cricut, even if it's not a vector image. The Cricut thinks in vector images, but Design Space is good at two things: converting raster images made to be vectors into vectors, and advertising Cricut Access.
So, since I think this is a little easier than vectors, let's make a design in our image editing program. I use GIMP, and I've been using GIMP for over 10 years, and when you insult it, you insult my children, and I don't have to have a Creative Cloud subscription, so we're using GIMP in my tutorial. It's free. I love me some free and open source programs.
I'm aiming this tutorial at people who aren't super familiar with image editing software. If you are familiar, the answer is "if you can do it with your color mode set to a 1 bit indexed color palette and make a transparent background, you're good."
And no, I didn't crop my screenshots. Start by buying and obviously not stealing a stock image of what you want to make.
Somewhere on your screen (on the right if you have GIMP set to default settings), there's a layer box. Make a new transparent layer (it'll default to transparent) above your layer with your image. Select your reference layer and use the lock button that looks like a paintbrush. This will stop you from editing the layer, also accidentally doing this all on the reference layer and making things hard for yourself. Ask me how I know.
If you have keyboard shortcuts set to default, hit your N key to access your pencil tool. Otherwise, grab it out of your toolbox like this.
Your pencil tool, unlike your paintbrush tool, will paint with a hard edge. There's no gray or semitransparent pixels around the outside of your stroke. This makes it look a lot blockier, but it also makes what we're about to do possible.
Pick where you want to start digitizing, and click there. A nice thing about the pencil tool is that it doesn't matter how hard or soft the brush you selected is designed to be. The pencil tool will make it a hard edge.
If you hold down your shift key now, you'll see a little line stretching from your last click down to your current location on your brush. If you click, it'll draw a line between your last click and your current location.
So start shift+clicking your way around the sections you want to draw. This is a lot easier than trying to freehand it, especially if you're not using a tablet. You can make this a little bit blockier than you might think, because the cricut will smooth things out a little bit when it cuts.
Around tight spots, you might need a smaller brush. There's a size option in the lefthand tool box, but you can also press [ for shrinking the brush and ] for making it bigger.
Once you have your area outlined, grab your bucket tool (Shift+B on default keyboard shortcuts) and fill in the areas you've outlined. Since you used the pencil tool and not the paintbrush, it'll fill the whole area up nice and neat.
If it fills your entire canvas when you click, check to make sure that your outline doesn't have holes in it, and make sure that your paint bucket tool is set on "fill similar colors" and not "fill entire area."
Since you're making this image in a single color, you will need to figure out how to make the different parts of the design clear. I like leaving little gaps between the parts. Figuring this part out is really the secret to good digitizing.
Once you have your design made, you can turn off your background layer by clicking the eye next to that layer. (You can also make things easier for yourself by using multiple layers as you digitize). The checkboard background that shows up means that your background is transparent. That's good.
Then, go to your image tag and hit "crop to content." The computer will cut out all that extra space around your image.
You can then export it as a .png file to preserve the transparency. Go into Design Space and open it up. Since you uploaded a transparent file, you won't need to go through the process of deleting your background.
Design Space likes to interpret my png files as GIGANTIC, which I think is GIMP being set to default at 300 ppi and Design Space thinking it's 72ppi. But you can just go into that top bar and shrink it down to something reasonable. You just use the adjustment option in the righthand corner of this screenshot, and you can change it from 35" down to 6".
Remember to never steal stock images and trace them without paying. Obviously I can't encourage that.
Anyway, yes, you can get smoother lines using the pen tool, but if you're going to use the pen tool, you might as well just use an actual vector software. Shift+click is still pretty good and is pretty intuitive and easy.
Coming up later, we'll have actual vector software involved. But remember, if it works, it works. If you do all your cricut digitizing in microsoft paint, and it looks good, it works.
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