All Things Studio (Silhouette 101 Video Class)

Welcome to design at Silhouette Studio. I'm Kelly. Women with

silhouette

. Let's get to know Silhouette Studio better for design purposes while doing some fun projects along the way. I recommend following the steps in your own software, whether you want to or not. To cut down on final projects, practicing software tools will help you learn how they work so you can use them beyond what you see in class. I'll be using Silhouette Cameo 3 in this class, but Silhouette Studio runs any

silhouette

cutter model. first let's take a quick tour of the software, okay, we have our software tools, our drawing tools on the left, we have some general document tools on the top, our main navigation tabs on the top right and our tools or study panels throughout.

On the right side we have a quick access toolbar here at the top that contains frequently used tools and that changes depending on what you have open or selected. You'll see that I use it a lot, so when you open Silhouette Studio for the first time. You will see the workspace and that is also called the design area. You have a cutting area here that looks like your virtual mat and your waiting area here that is outside of the virtual mat. Your page setup panel is the top right panel option. It opens automatically when you first open Silhouette Studio and the page size you set actually determines your cutting area.

Also in the page setup panel you have your cutting mat selection and that and below you want to check Show cutting edge when you check or uncheck this. In the box you have a little red line that appears at the edge of your page that shows what your cutting area is and that's actually more noticeable when we set up a letter size page and we're going to reveal the cutting mat, so now if I check show cut border and from time to time you will see red lines appear, so everything you want to cut must be inside that red border.

If you don't have Show Cut Edge checked, you may not realize that you're outside of your available cut space until you go to the cut preview in the send panel, so I almost always leave this on show edge. cutting enabled. I'm going to set it back to full opacity for my mat and we'll see the preferences, that's this. little gear icon in the bottom right corner and it has several tabs with lots of options, but I just want to show you how I set mine up to design in Silhouette Studio, so in the defaults tab I've checked crop to edge of page.

So if you remember that little red cut border that I showed earlier, if you don't have it checked, you can leave a little border around the border of the page size that you set or you can check this box to tell the software to cut it off. full page size and of course that's limited by your machine so if I uncheck crop to page edge and click apply then that edge has moved so let me click OK and I'm going to zoom in and now you can see this little red border. here, if I uncheck show cut edge, you can see that edge better.

I'm going to go back to the preferences and I want to mark the crop to the edge of a page so I can use my full crop area and the full page size that I have set. Okay, so next we want to go to the tools tab and this is where you can choose to have any of your tools return to the main selection area arrow after using each tool and you do this by having it say choose select or you can choose to continue using the tool and tell you until you manually switch to reselect any of the options is fine and it's easy to switch back here in preferences if your particular project is better with one or the other, so I'll show you with the knife tool.

So after using the knife, we will choose to continue using the knife and click OK to confirm that choice. Now I'm going to draw a rectangle here with my drawing tools and select the knife that I want. be treated as solid and I want it to be checked Automatic apply and you will see that as I use this knife tool the knife tool stays selected because of the choice I made in the preferences and you can continue with your knife tool until you click in this. select the icon here at the top left again or you can use your hotkey, your shortcut letter V on your keyboard and that will take you back to your selection tool as well if in the preferences you choose to select after using the tool you have to use, choose select again your little select icon every time you want to use it again, so in the preferences I'll set all of mine to choose select and if you do that too your behavior will match mine as you work on the projects. in the software there is now another section here for selection tools and if you want it to behave like mine, choose when you drag it by selecting the shapes you want by tapping the drag box, that means you don't have to completely enclose the shapes when you want to select them .

We're just going to select it when you touch it with the mouse while you drag it and we also want a single bounding box so the screen doesn't get cluttered with a bunch of bounding boxes and rotation handles okay so once you've set it to Yes , then your software will behave like mine. Let's start working with designs. Now open a new page by clicking on the plus symbol at the top left of your workspace. When you design in Silhouette Studio, you can work with designs from your library. text drawing tools or a combination of any of them, let's make a small camera box directly from the library, we will cut it without modifying it, but we will use various layout tools when preparing it for cutting.

These tools are useful for working with most designs. So let's get to the software. I bought a design called 3D Instant Camera Case from the silhouette design store, so it was added to my library. We'll go to the library navigation tab and just use the camera search. and when I find the layout I want, I'll just double-click to open it on my layout page. I'm going to reset my layout page to fill my entire cameo mat, so I'll choose the cameo option that way. I can see as much as possible and if you're working with a smaller machine you can just move your design to the side as you work, which is optional, but what I like to do when I'm designing is color the objects and line them up so I have a visual idea of ​​what they're going to look like and tell me what papers to use, so I'm going to ungroup them and I can do that in the quick access toolbar and now they're separated and sometimes you'll find that they separate pieces that you don't really want to separate, so these perforated lines here down below I'm going to zoom in a little bit so that these perforated lines have separated from their outer box and I don't want that.

So I'm going to select the box and the perforated lines and I'm going to go ahead and group them again, that's in the quick access toolbar and now you can move this without losing any pieces that should stay together. I'll see my full page. again and I want to select these pieces one at a time and use fill colors to color them, so I'm going to select this one and in the top left corner you can choose a fill color that I'm going to fill this one with. black now, when we're just cutting paper, the fill color doesn't really matter, it's just given me an idea of ​​what paper colors I want to use and being able to see and move

things

now.

I want these holes here on this. pieces are of different colors. I want to be able to cut them different colors, so I'm going to ungroup this shape and I want to copy, it's just those three pieces, so I'm going to select those three pieces and I'm going to use one of my favorite ways to copy twist, which is to hold the Alt key or would be an option if you're using a Mac and you just click and drag to the side and that makes a really good copy, so I want to group I put this first original piece back together so it doesn't come apart as I move it.

I'm going to ungroup these three and I can select one at a time to recolor them now, as I mentioned, the quick access toolbar has one color. fill option in the corner, but if we're coloring a lot of pieces at the same time or in succession, then I like to open the fill panel and it stays open while I choose the different colors, so I'm going to do one of these. pink, one of these yellow and one of these turquoise now, once you have all of these pieces filled, let's go ahead and finish filling them. I also like to arrange my pieces just to make sure they fit, so this one that I want in front of this other piece and it goes behind, so again in the quick access toolbar I'm going to choose bring to front and then we have other options as well up here, like center, so I'm just going to take a minute and get these all lined up and remember you can group these pieces if you want to move them at the same time so they don't separate, but you're just going to group and ungroup them as you go to make sure that

things

are where you want them.

Okay, now I know that this camera box is going to look the way I want, so I'm going to split it up and move these pieces to the holding area because I only want to cut one at a time, now this is so small. box here the square here I actually want to make another copy because I want to cut it once with this box base and then I want to cut another one out of pattern paper, so I'm going to make another copy again with my alt or option key and click and drag a copy, okay, so I'll start with my tan piece.

I want to cut it first so that everything on the side doesn't get cut. This is in my cutting area and I want to make sure. in my page setup panel matches the page I'm going to cut so it's a 12 by 12 inch sheet of paper and I'm using my 12 inch cutting mat for the Cameo and then we're ready to move on to the send panel which is in the top right corner, so this cut preview shows with bold lines what is going to be cut so you know where the machine intends to cut, if you need to rotate something, if you don't want it to cut, can do it. move it to the side or you have options like changing it to no cut or to cut and cut the edge and we'll cover it again with another project.

You'll notice that these pieces on the side here don't show the bold. lines so you know they are not going to cut well. I'm going to cut this out of pattern paper, so I'm going to go ahead and choose my material is medium pattern paper and I want the action to be cut and I'm going to use my auto sheet, so my tool is set to auto sheet, like this I have the paper loaded on my mat and my rollers are set for the entire width of the 12 inch mat and I'm just going to load it by lining it up. this side here and the arrow over here and I'll hit load now that it's loaded we'll just hit send in the software to have all my pieces cut out and I've taken them off my mat so now I'm just I'm going to show you how to put together this little box of camera.

I'll start with the largest base, fold it along those perforations, and just start adding a little bit of adhesive. I'm going to put this piece together before gluing it to friends if I'm covering a smaller area, I'm just going to use a little needle tip glue applicator, these little colored pieces will fit perfectly in there because we took them right off that black piece and when I do paper crafts I always like to add a little dimension, so I'm going to use some foam adhesive to advance that little camera lens, okay, and one of these can be glued to the front and one to the back later and now you have a fun little camera case to give as a party favor. put something prettier now that you know some basics for working with existing designs, we're going to manipulate some library designs a little more for this project, we're going to take a 3D box and change the cutout design on the front we're going to use a box simple in this example, but you can use the same technique with many different boxes, bags, and other designs to personalize them.

We'll talk about grouping versus compound paths and also what's appropriate for a clipped layout, so let's move on to the software. I opened this file called crayon box from my library and the heart is cute, but what if I want to use it as a favor for a theme party? In this example, I'm going to replace the heart with a unicorn. I already opened two different styles of unicorn. The first thing we must do is remove the heart from the painting. I'm going to get a little closer. Now this design is full of color and you can see when I move this heart. in the middle there is a hole, you can see what's behind it, so you can ungroup this box to a certain extent and it will ungroup the perforated lines, but it doesn't and it will group the heart, that's because it's a compound path, which I like think. as a single layer with holesbut we can still free that heart, we're going to select just the box, not the perforations and you can just right click and choose to free the compound path.

Now you will see that that heart has been filled with color and we can separate it from the box, we are simply going to drag the heart to the side, we are not going to use it, but we want to group those perforations again with the box and the group appears again on the Quick-access tool bar. now we have a box ready and we can add a unicorn but you can't add any design the design can't have inner pieces because those are fine they will fall out when cut so I have a letter A and you can see that hole would fall out if you cut it, so it's not a good design.

Using a good design is simply using an outline like this unicorn profile. Now this one has an internal piece that is an eye, but that's fine. It doesn't matter if that falls down. I want the full profile of this unicorn, so we'll resize it to two inches wide and place it where the heart used to be. I'm going to use the scale tool while it's selected. 'm I'm going to make sure the aspect ratio is locked and I'm just going to change the width to two inches and press Enter and that makes it the right size for me.

Now I'm going to make a copy of the box so I can make a unicorn on another box, so again I'm going to use my Alt key or option on a Mac and click and drag a copy. Now this unicorn here is not an outline, but I can use it because it is a template type design. of these pieces are separated from each other and each individual piece will become a hole in the bottom so it will work for us when I resize this with the corner handle just under 2.5 inches tall and I can see that the dimension changes as I drag it. corner handle, so now when I move this to the top of the box, you can see that it's underneath, so I'm going to use my bring to front option in the quick access toolbar which brings it to the front again, like this Let's see the lyrics.

A again and I'm going to show you how you can turn that into a template. We need to create a space right here so that the inner hole is connected to the outer bottom area. You can do it with the knife or the eraser. tool, the eraser tool is a little bit bigger, but you don't have a lot of control and the knife tool will give you a straight line, so it has a nice visible indicator, so I'm just going to make sure that it's treated as solid and I'll click and I'm going to drag my knife tool down and that's going to make a cut there and I'm going to do it one more time and now you can see that the inside of that letter is now going to be connected to the background if I place it over the box, so that's one way to convert a design in a template so as not to lose the intersection.

Okay, now the only decision we have to make is whether to group this or turn it into a compound path. to connect that Unicorn to the box, if we use the mod tools, which is a mod panel in the panel section, we can make a compound path here now, the machine doesn't really care since it's just cutting, it doesn't care It doesn't matter if it's grouped or a compound path, let's change one of these layouts, let's change this one to a compound path, so I'm going to choose to make a compound path with both the selected ones and this one, once I have the layout where I want it, I'm just going to go. to group it so you can see they look a little different, the color has changed where we did a compound path so you have a visual change, but when we go to the shipping panel you can see that all those cut lines that we need are in bold red and so grouping or compound paths will work in this situation, so we'll go ahead and set the material as pattern paper and the action to cut and the automatic knife tool and then once my paper. is loaded on the mat.

I can load it into the machine and just click send and then it'll cut it for me, so I cut these out of a variety of papers on my Cameo machine and I'll just show you how to do it. assemble them to have these perforations and we're just going to fold along all the perforation marks. This one has quite a few touches but it's really pretty when it comes together and we only need to glue on one tab and then just pop everything in like a normal crane box, put your wreaths in, so now you have a really fun and colorful party favor.

The next project will serve to modify existing designs. It involves welding shapes to a frame. We will make a flamenco card, so we are in the software. We will open a new document and start by making the base of the card. We want the Rounded Rectangle tool that you'll find here with the drawing tools. When you hover over it, you will get a small side menu and you can choose the rounded rectangle. option, so we'll draw this, just click and drag, make it about five inches wide and seven inches tall and once I have it roughly how I want, I can change it to the exact measurements in the scale panel, so I want to do I make sure it's unlocked so I can change each dimension separately so my height is seven and my width is five and I press Enter and that goes exactly where it needs to be now in a rounded rectangle tool we can adjust the curve of the corners I'm going to hold down the shift key while I drag one of these red dots and that will make sure that they change in the same proportion, so I want it to be a kind of wide curve that looks nice and now I want to make a window inside of there , so I'm going to use my scroll tool.

You can find it on the right side with a scroll panel and I want to choose internal offset if I want to make something inside the shape bigger, so I'll click internal offset and I want to change my distance to about 0.7 zero. You can use the slider or just use the input box once it's ready. I'll click Apply Now. I want to select just the rounded rectangle and I'm going to make two copies and one of the other ways I like to make a copy is to hold down my control key or that would be a command if you're using a Mac and just press the arrow on your keyboard while you're holding down that control key, so I made my two duplicates right on the side and I've got my two sides on my card base and I need to solder them together, so let's zoom in and I'm actually going to push this piece left a little bit. just to make sure it completely overlaps this other piece, so I'm going to use my arrow key and tap it once to the right to select.

I'll select just the original rounded rectangle and the one next to it. on the left and I know they overlap, so I'm ready to choose welding and I can do that in the quick access toolbar. A guide arrow appeared there that I don't want, so I'm just going to select it and press delete, okay? now I want to turn this into a rectangle on a cutout on this card. I wanted it to be a frame and that will allow me to weld other shapes to it, so I'll select the inner rectangle and make sure to bring it to the front.

I can do that in the quick access toolbar and you'll see if I fill the pieces with color they are now separate pieces, they both fill with color, so any welding I did at this point would actually absorb that inner piece and not be separates it will just disappear so I want to make this a compound path and I want there to be a hole in the middle so select the base and the inner rectangle and then I'm going to open up my modify panel and if I choose to create it I'm going to convert the overlapping pieces in holes, so now that's a window, so now I have a frame and I can solder other designs onto this card shape that we've created.

I'm going to go to my library and I want a shape called fringed flamingo, double click to open, come back to see the full page. Okay, this is now the correct size. I don't need to resize it for this card. If you choose your own layout, you need to make sure you have pieces that will overlap the frame you created, so I'm going to ungroup this and move these other pieces to the side. I don't need them yet and I'm going to place this Flamingo base here on the card so that it overlaps. I'll zoom in again and I've got an overlapping area with the beak, tail and foot, that's what I want, so I'll select the Flamingo and the frame together and click weld and you'll see that the flamingo has taken on the color of the background.

Now they are all in one piece. Now I want to add a phrase on top of the flamingo, so I'll choose my text tool on the left. click down to create a cursor and I'll write stand tall in all caps now. If this is too long, I'll drag this blue handle to the side of the blue bar and that will force a line break of my two words now. on the quick access toolbar and since I'm working with text, I have text options and I want to choose Center to justify that as sent as Center. You can also find these same options if you open the text style panel to select. text, you can do it in two ways: while it has a blinking cursor, you can just drag the letters like you would select text in other programs or you can click to the side and click once and that will also select the text I want. change the font and I know the name of the font so I'm going to start typing some tinsel W and press Enter and that has changed my font to the one I want so I want to be able to solder them together but that means they have to overlap , so I'm going to go to my text style panel on the right and I can change the character spacing and the line spacing so they overlap, so I'm just going to reduce the character spacing to about 85. % and my line spacing is about 60% and they overlap pretty well at this point.

I'm going to zoom in a little bit closer now, at this point I can just ungroup them and put them together, so I'm going to ungroup them now, right? longer text and I can use my arrow keys to nudge everything so that I have pieces that touch and overlap. I'm going to group those two, group the top one, group the bottom word and then I can use my alignment. Center the choice in the quick access toolbar so everything is lined up again after you've moved things around and keep in mind that once you ungroup the text you can't edit it further so you may want to make a copy first before I ungroup any text, okay, so now they can be soldered together, click solder here, it looks like I have a little gap, so I can still bring it a little bit closer and solder it again, then I'm going to zoom out a little bit and I want let this text overlap that frame just a little bit so we can weld it on top, okay, so it's done.

I'm going to go ahead and select everything and click solder and now that's all one piece, the last thing I do. I need to finish this card, make it like a card so I can cut it, is to draw a perforated line, so I'm going to go here to my line drawing tool, select the draw a straight line tool and click drag if I hold down the shift key while I drag, that will make the zoom perfectly vertical again and I can change it to a punch by choosing a dash to align on top with the line style in the quick access toolbar now I want to make this line perfectly centered, so I'm going to select the line and the card and I'm just going to choose with my alignment options this Object Center and now I'm going to group it so they all move together, okay? and you'll remember I made an extra rounded rectangle here at the beginning what I want to do with that is cut it out of some pattern paper and it'll just sit behind this card.

The only problem is that you might have this left edge tucked into the corner of the perforation. the fold line and it gets in the way, so I'm going to use my knife to cut just a little so it doesn't interfere with the piercing when you bend it, so take the knife on the On the left, choose to treat the shape as solid and this time I want to uncheck Apply Automatically, that means when I draw my knife tool, my knife line again hold down the shift key while dragging so that it is perfectly vertical, so instead of automatically cutting where it is, I can use my arrow keys and I position the knife line where I want it so it barely overlaps and now I can click Apply and that has trimmed that little edge and we can delete it, and like every time we cut, just remember just have on your mat the paper you want to cut at that time and you can set the page size in your send panel so if this was cutting it on letter size paper I would make sure to choose letter size paper and I can change it to landscape orientation and that way I know that will fit and then when I finish cutting this pink piece, I would just move it to the side, move another piece and change my role on the mat and just make sure that every time you do that, you change your settings in the shipping panel for the appropriate color and the appropriate weight of paper, so I'm going to go ahead and cut them out one at a time and thenI will assemble to cut them.

These pieces individually on my mat on the Cameo machine and now I'm just going to show you how to make a few, so this is the big card base that we made and it has that perforation that we added and I want to put this piece like this. it's the side where we cut with the knife tool so that it fits nicely there without interfering with that drilling, so I'm just going to glue it on first to make sure we have enough adhesive to make sure it sticks. It's just a type of adhesive tape, it's good at covering a lot of area and it's dry so it doesn't cause any warping that you can get with some liquid glues.

I use liquid glue on thin areas, just apply a few small dots of that. I want this to stick to this pattern paper that we're going to put there so all that adhesive is there. I'm going to go ahead and line this up, hold it in place and I'm just going to fold it and press it down and then we have the layers of this fringed flamingo and it's just three sections and I want to curl the little bangs a little bit to give it some dimension so that you can see those layers when it's all together a little bit. a little bit of curling and then I'm going to use my glue again and I'm not going to put any glue on the fringe parts just the top areas and I'm going to line them up with the liquid glue.

You have a little wiggle room to reposition sooner. dries and then my other layer and the top there and I would probably press it and hold it for a moment just to make sure it sets really well and then I would lift those little fringes again once it's completely dry, but then you have this card really fun textured design that we created completely from scratch, so those are some ways to use and modify existing designs to create unique projects. One of the best things about Silhouette Studio is that you can create a project from scratch without purchasing any designs, so make a card completely from scratch using drawing and text tools.

Get started in the software. I have a new document open and I'm going to use the grid to create my card layers in the Page Setup panel. Open the second tab for the grid. Check the boxes to show grid and to snap to grid. I can darken the grid lines by moving the selection point on the colored section at the bottom. With snap to grid enabled, drawing rectangles is very easy. I usually keep the spacing at 1 inch and the splits at 4, which means my adjustment points can be that small. about a quarter of an inch, although you can change these dimensions for your own projects, if you have Designer Edition or higher you have a few more options, such as enabling rulers, guides, and crosshairs, for now we're just talking about the basic grid functions available In the standard edition, grab your rectangle tool here with the drawing tools with the side menu.

I'm going to choose to draw a rectangle, start at any point here on the grid and just click and drag. I'll drag it out and down and watch the dimensions change as it goes. I draw these corners to snap to the grid points. I want it to be exactly 4.25 inches wide and I want it to be 5.5 inches tall. I can see the dimensions changing as I draw along the side and bottom, release the mouse when it is in the correct position. size and now I have the rectangle with exactly the dimensions I want. I'll zoom in a little and this time I want to draw another rectangle exactly 1/4 inch inside the first one.

I'll start at the quarter inch. grid point in there and drag down diagonally to seamlessly transition to those grid points making it 3.75 inches wide and 5.0 inches tall. We're going to add a third layer, but I just want it a little bigger than the inner rectangle I just drew for this. we can use the scroll function, open the scroll panel on the right side which looks like a star with an outline, select the inner rectangle and then click scroll. We wanted to have sharp corners to make another rectangle that I don't want it to have. these curved corners, so choose the sharp corner option and then decrease the distance entered to about 0.085.

See how that changes as I move the slider or you could enter that with numbers and click Apply. Now I want to color these rectangles here so they can represent the colors. of paper I'm going to use the inner rectangle. I want gray for the next one. I'm going to choose a blue and then the outer rectangle. I will also do very well. I'll use my eyedropper tool here. the fill colors and I will choose the same first color of gray. Now I'm going to zoom out, move them out of the way, and create a folded base for my card again with snap to grid still active.

I'll choose my rectangle tool. I'm going to draw it at 8.5 inches wide and 5.5 inches tall for our fold line. Let's draw a line with a line drawing tool, draw it in the middle and drag it down. I don't have to hold down the shift key when I have snap to grid enabled because it will just draw those straight lines for me, change it to a perforated line by going to the quick access toolbar with a line style option. I'll just change it to a dashed line, now let's make sure. the line is centered exactly inside the card base.

I'm going to select join them and in the quick access toolbar I'm going to center align them. I'm going to zoom in and make sure those lines are where I want them grouped and now. I have a card base and several layers to place on the front of my card. At this point, I can turn off snapping to grid in the grid panel. We no longer need active setpoints. I'll also make those grid lines. A little lighter, you can turn off your grid lines with this display grid checkbox, but you can also use the G hotkey on your keyboard to turn those grid lines on and off.

You don't always have to use the Page Setup panel to have your grid displayed or turned off. Let's continue designing the front of this card. We'll add some text and turn it into a thank you card. Click the text tool on the left. Click anywhere on the page to create a cursor, and then type thank you. Let's open the text style panel so we can choose a font. I'm going to use the Salma font. I bought this at the design store so it's already in my software and ready to use. It's a nice script font if you don't want to. to buy that font you can use any font installed on your computer, resize this text with a corner handle to about three inches wide, it doesn't have to be exact, just about three inches, at this point we could cut all of these layers and call card. okay, but I want to curve the text since this is a layout class, let's go a little further and make it fun with curved text, we can do it with text to path.

I'm going to draw an oval that will provide a curve for my text. to fit use the ellipse drawing tool to draw a flat oval I will make it about one inch tall and about four and a half inches wide I will zoom in to see my text I will double click on the text to enter text editing mode when we have text editing mode enabled, we have a four-headed arrow here, we'll grab this arrow with a click and drag it with the mouse, we'll drag it to the top of the oval that you'll see as you slide. along which it was adjusted and follows that oval path.

Notice that the oval has also turned gray, indicating that it has been changed to a path, so while the text will be cut, the path will not be cut, drag it to the front of our card and go. To change it to a white fill color so we can see it a little better, we could stop here with some nice curved text for our card, but I want to show you something else that you can do with your design tools in Silhouette Studio, so here we are. If you are going to create some butterflies for a nice finishing touch, you can find hundreds of butterflies in the silhouette design store and you may already have some in your library, but I said we would make this card from scratch so we can create our own. butterflies with the design tools available in Silhouette Studio go ahead and open a new document by clicking the little plus icon.

I've already created some butterflies and I'll use them as examples while I create some new ones. I have them in stages so we can see what they are supposed to look like, start with the ellipse drawing tool to draw an oval about an inch tall and 1.7 inches wide, use the green rotation handle on the top of the oval to rotate it a little bit clockwise about 30 degrees now I'm going to use the replication panel, it's here with some overlapping ovals like the icon with my oval selected. I'll choose the bottom mirror, let's drag the handle on the left side to make the bottom piece about 1.4 inches wide, drag the bottom oval up. then the first oval overlaps a little, select both and align their right edges in the quick access toolbar, select the bowls and mirror to the right again with the replication panel, group the four ovals in the quick access toolbar quick access, now I want to draw a thin vertical oval for the center of this butterfly that is with the Ellipse tool again, just draw a thin oval and since these other ovals are already grouped together, I can use my align Center option and that will make the middle oval is perfectly centered with the rest of them, okay?

Let's zoom in and edit some points. Double click on the thin oval that shows these little edit points, which means we're in point edit mode and now I can choose any of these points to change the curve of it. oval, click on the top edit point and you'll see it turn white and you'll see these Bezier handles that I can drag to change the curve of this center oval and while that point is selected I can also use the arrow key on my keyboard to nudge that point down that looks pretty good, so I'm going to select all the oval pieces and choose weld in the quick access toolbar.

This butterfly has some pieces that didn't completely overlap when we soldered, so if I want to get rid of those extra spots after soldering, all I have to do is right click and choose the release compound path and then those little ones. Parts can be selected and deleted. If you like that butterfly, you can stop there and cut it out as is, but I want to show you how you can further adjust the shape of the butterfly if you want with point editing. I can change the curve of these butterfly wings. Double click on the shape to enter point editing mode and then drag individual points or add more points if you want and change the curve however we want, just do what looks good and remember you can change the points and curves to align or smooth them as needed and manipulate the curves via the Bezier controllers.

It's nice to play with them and manipulate them according to what we want. works best for you, you should keep in mind that you can only edit points in shapes that are not grouped. Point editing also works for shapes in your library. It doesn't have to be your own creation. I'm going to take this final butterfly that I like the shape of and I'm going to make a copy and bring it to the page where we first created the card. I'm going to do Ctrl C or you can use command C on a Mac to make a copy and then go back to the thank you card document and do Ctrl or command V to paste that butterfly on this page or right click and choose paste.

I'm going to take this butterfly and I want it to be about 1.3 inches tall. I can fit three butterflies on the If I make them that size, once I have the right size, I can make two more copies of the little butterfly. I'll hold down Ctrl or Command and use the arrow key to make more copies so all of these pieces are finished and we can. We are ready to cut as before, we will move the pieces we want to cut to the virtual mat and we will move the pieces we will cut later to the side.

I'm going to cut out my butterflies first, so just bring them to the top of my mouth. I have a piece of paper that I know these butterflies fit on. Go to the sin panel and I'm using pattern paper and I want my action to be cut. I'm going to use my switchblade. I'm going to go ahead and load this butterfly paper onto my mat and cut them out when they're done cutting them, I'm going to take them off my mat and I'm going to get ready to cut out the next object that I actually put down.

I'll show you right now I'm going to take them off my mat like I'm done cutting them, everything else is paper, but I'm going to cut this thank you out of vinyl and I'm going to zoom in and you can see it. Although we have this text on a path and it is curved, we have not done anythingto get rid of those overlapping edges, so we can weld the letters in the quick access toolbar, but that won't allow us to edit the text anymore. Another way to cut around the letters is in the send panel, when we have that text selected we can choose to cut the border which will ignore any overlapping pieces and just cut around the edge when we are ready to cut the letters. vinyl I can change the material to vinyl and that will be cut with the appropriate settings so I'm going to go ahead and just cut these pieces one at a time with the different settings for each material so I cut all these different pieces with my cameo machine and now we are ready to assemble the card, here is my card base that I created with punches, we will do that first and I am going to stick this larger rectangle directly on it just using my normal roller adhesive to cover a lot of area, just line it up and smooth it out.

I love using my cameo for card bases because I can make everything exactly perfect. Okay, on the next layer I'm going to put the gray on top of the blue, just watch to align. I put it up and now I want to put my thank you on the front of the card and I cut it out of vinyl so it's like a nice sticker and sticks really well to the paper. I'll just have to remove the weeds, just go slow enough to Make sure you don't have any pieces, create the rest of the vinyl and then remove these letter centers with my hook tool.

Okay, so once I have them all weeded out, I'm going to use transfer tape to select all of this. At the same time I just put my transfer tape on there, it's a scraper tool to get it nice and then I usually turn it over and remove the transfer tape backing and that leaves the vinyl in place and I just want let it be about a third of the way down, okay, he's my scraper tool again, if I apply pressure with the scraper tool against the transfer tape, that puts it in place nicely and now these butterflies, I'm going to put them in order. so they look nice and we can give these butterflies some dimension, so just fold them and curl them a little bit.

I think my hook tool does a good job. He's just using the handle to curl them, but our butterfly wings and you can. Still, mail the card with those kind of dimensions, it's really nice, so as soon as I have these wings shaped, I'll just use a dot of glue to put them on the paper, so it'll just be a little dot that already it is perfect. circle and it sticks instantly, just place them at a little bit of an angle and what's there you can continue curling them and shaping them a little bit if you need to, so that part of the card is ready and I want it to stick out a little bit from the base of the card, so I'll use foam adhesive, we'll line it up on the card and that makes a really nice dimensional card and you can see how Silhouette Studio has a lot of tools that you can use when designing from scratch without library designs.

Now we've talked about how to work with library layouts, modify library layouts, and create layouts from scratch with drawing tools and text tools. In the next section, you will learn about some specialized design tools in Silhouette Studio such as Popup Maker and Warp Tools. Some of these special tools require Designer Edition or higher, but even basic users can use the popup creator. Let me show you how it works as we create a pop up cactus card once you know how it works. You can choose your own designs to use on popup cards in the software. I have a new document and I opened the design called I can't touch this that I bought from the design store.

I want to resize this to exactly 5.1 inches tall and I will use my scale tool in the quick access toolbar, I'll click on the lock symbol to resize everything proportionally and change the height to 5.1 inches and press Enter now. I'll drag it to the side and ungroup it so I can access the individual parts. I will drag a copy of the cactus to the virtual man. I'll hold down the Alt key or the Option key on a Mac and just click and drag a copy. I always like to work with a copy of the design when using the popup creator so I can access the original shape later.

Now I want to draw a card base with my rectangular drawing tool. I'm going to make it 5.5 inches wide and 8.5 inches tall. I'm going to start with my rectangle tool and then I'm going to adjust it with my scale options, unlock it and then I'm going to make it five point five inches wide and 8.5 inches tall. . I want to draw a perforated line, so I'm just going to use my line tool and just drag it horizontally while holding down shift and it should be 5.5 inches wide, so in the scale tool I'm going to lock it and plug in my dimensions.

You better unlock it 5.5 inches wide and zero. inches tall now I'm going to center them along with the center option on the quick access toolbar and I'm going to change my line to a perforation with the line style and group it which gives me the outside base of my card. Now I want to create an inner piece where the pop plane itself will be attached. I'm going to use my rounded rectangle tool and I want this to be 5.0 inches wide and 8.0 inches tall, select it and change those dimensions again with the scale tool. I'm going to go ahead and center it with the base again using the quick access toolbar which gives us a smooth border around the inside piece and the outside piece where it's going to be attached, I bring the cactus in a little bit and I want to center this cactus vertically.

I can use my vertical alignment tool, my Center option, but visually that's not exactly in the center, that's simply because the shape itself is balanced asymmetrically, so to give me the visual balance I need, I'm going to push that with the arrow key now. You are ready to open the popup panel and turn this cactus into a popup window. Select the cactus. Open up the popup panel here on the right and with that cactus selected, I'll click Convert Selected Shapes to Popups. When you start the software, the cactus automatically turns into a pop-up window with the slices and perforations where they should be.

What we need to do with this is position it so that the pop-up fold line matches the existing fold line we've already created perfectly. centered on the base, select the cactus and simply use the arrow key to push the cactus up, zoom in and we want the red dotted popup fold line to match the fold line we already created. Now I have those two matching lines. up zoom out a little I want these red dots to extend to the edge of my inner rectangle so that the full line goes all the way through for the cactus to attach to and drag both red dots to the edge of the shape I want to attach my window popup, which is the inner rectangle we made earlier.

This is the most important part of creating a pop-up card, but we can also adjust these internal folding tabs called struts. This will vary from design to design. this cactus I'm going to change it to a 20% base width the base width changes the bottom connection the minimum strut width keeps some of those connections from being too thin I'm going to change mine to point zero eight five - pitch controls the width of the perforations on the struts and I'm going to set that to point zero three zero you can also adjust how far the pop-out sticks out from the rest of the card by dragging this little arrow here you can I have it very close to the card or it stands out very far away and I'm going to click undo so I can leave it at the default value.

I need to group the cactus and the inner rectangle so I'll select both and then choose group now I can move the larger base to the side since we don't need it until we're ready to cut. We can do whatever we want with this design. Now to dress it up I will change the color of my card base to pink. so I know what color I want to cut it and I'm going to change the popup card to a turquoise or aquamarine color whose fill color covered my lines, so I'm going to ungroup it briefly and I'm going to select that background piece and send it back and then the I will group again and then my cactus will be green.

We could stop here and cut, but I want to add a few more elements. I have a design in my library called Aztec Card that has some pieces that I really like, it gives my card a Southwestern theme, so I'm going to borrow one of these sections from this card and put them on my own card for the corners. Now if I try to ungroup, it won't let me ungroup those pieces, so if you remember, if you can't ungroup, that means it's a composite PAP, so I'll right click and choose release composite path, now I can access them. internal cart parts to select only the parts I want, I'll click and drag, but I can't get all the parts, so what I need to do to add to that selection is hold down the shift key while I click on them.

Other small fragments that were not selected the first time. Once I've selected those pieces, I'll group them together and then I can remove them. I don't need the rest of this card. I'll need four of these. Shape one for each corner, so I'll go to my replica panel and create a column of four which will give me four of them very quickly. I'll place them in the four corners and use my alignment tools to place them where I want them. If I select them, I can use the arrow keys to move them to where I need to hold down the Shift key to select more than one piece at a time by clicking on them.

I'll keep moving them little by little and aligning them. them to each other to make sure I have them where I want them in relation to each other. I'm almost there, it looks good for those layouts and I want to add something else here, so I go to open another layout for my library, this triangle border is visible again. I only want a few of these pieces, so I'll ungroup them as much as possible. This is another compound, Pat, so to use those pieces I need to right click and choose drop. compound path, then I can drag the outside edge and I'm going to zoom in.

I just want three large triangles with two sets of small points between them. I will select them and choose the group. Now I can put them on my card. I'm going to put a set on this side of my cactus. Remember that you can always undo if you do something you don't like. That undo button at the top is very useful. I'm going to select it and then I'm going to press Ctrl or The command arrow is going to make another copy and then I'm going to hold down the shift key with my arrow to make jumps a little bit wider, so it looks pretty good and I'm going to group all of this right now so I can move it without losing.

Any piece of these little cutouts on this piece of blue card will let the pink base show through, which is a fun effect. Finally I want to take my text here that is part of the original cactus design and I will group it and resize it. at about 3.1 inches wide and 3.3 inches tall once I have it I will bring it to the front so I can see it and I can cut it out of vinyl and place it in the bottom section of the cart. Leave enough room to write a short handwritten note on the card.

I'll look at everything and that's fine with me, so we're ready to cut. I can cut my base with pink and then I'll move it once it's there. cut and I'm going to move my blue piece onto my mat and cut it out of the blue paper, then you can cut this text out of the white vinyl just like we did in the last project and finally I'm going to cut out two of these cacti and I'll show you how to assemble that after I've cut it all out with my cameo, so I've got all these pieces cut out and I've weeded my vinyl, I've done it all with my cameo and now let me show you how to actually work. with the pop up card once it's in and trim it so there's this main fold line in the center, you want it to be a valley fold, you don't want to fold that pop up piece in the middle so be gentle. of gently folding everything a little bit at a time to make sure the right pieces are folded in the right directions to get these little perforations, so I just gently pull out and up as I get these top perforations on each of these segments and just Be very gentle, just move it a little at a time to make sure they bend where they're supposed to, so now that I've got them starting to bend the right way, I'm just going to pull that up. make sure they're going in the right direction and eventually you can get to the point where you're folding nicely, so now I can press that flat part, press it and get a nice fold on all of them now if you have small, thin parts.

On the back you can just cut them with scissors or just move them out of the way. Any of those things reallythin, you won't really notice it when you stick it to your card. Okay, now we have that's ready and I have the base, so I'm going to fold it into the hole that we created in the crypt and now I'm just going to stick it in there so that those two holes match up and center it, then fold it down. the inside part and I'll add the glue, so I'll use my liquid glue for those little thin spots and then I'll move on to the wider roll glue in a moment once I've got all these thin spots taken care of, so I'm just holding that, keeping both layers in place while I work with the adhesive, once I have all the glue I need I can simply fold this top layer back and press it down to hold it perfectly in place and now the top section is glued and I can do the same to add adhesive to the bottom section and then when it's done again just fold the top layer down and press down and that will bring both pieces together so you have your pop. pop up card and then we'll just add these other little elements that stick to the cactus, so I like to do this with my pop up cards.

I'm going to cut them out and make the original shape into the popup design, but I'm going to save the original to the side so I can cut it out separately and that adds a really nice decorative piece to make that popup stand out and we can add this second cactus on top so it has a nice design on the outside as well and finally I'm going to add my little vinyl saying as the last item on the card and I'm going to leave the vinyl in place against the transfer tape, just line it up and press it when we remove the transfer tape, a vinyl it will just stay there against the paper, so we took a cactus design and the little phrase that goes with it and turned it into a really fun cactus pop-up card with lots of design elements.

Another special tool is the warp tool, which is available in Silhouette Studio Designer Edition and above. We used point editing tools when we created the butterfly from scratch in a previous project, that is a way to stretch and manipulate the curves of a design, but the warp tool is another way of doing it that I like to use to add a little bit of whimsy to a simple symmetrical design, so we're going to do that in the silhouette software, so I already have this cake design open and recolored and It's very cute as is, but the warp tool allows us to add more personality, so I'll select it and hold down Alt or Option to drag a copy to the side and we'll just save it so we can compare the two designs later , so I'm going to zoom in on my pie and I'm going to open up the warp panel now if you don't see it and remember this is for the designer edition and up, if you don't see it, if you have big buttons or a small screen, you're just looking for this little one pop- arrow out, but this is your warp panel icon, so let's go ahead and choose the candle first, so we'll select the candle and we'll just click on warp selected shapes now, that adds grid points where you can manipulate the design.

I'm going to zoom in a little bit closer and I'm going to squeeze the side, so I'm just dragging these little red dots. You can see how that shape curves and I'm going to lift up one corner and just make everything a little bit softer okay that looks good for the candle let's move on to the cake so select the cake and again choose to warp the selected shapes , this time I'm going to drag the top corners and sort of lasso. to the sides a little bit and keep doing that until it looks good and let's see, I'm just going to add a little bit to the curve at the top as well okay and moving on to the base, select it, choose warp selected shapes and I want to point out here that You can actually add more warp points by increasing the columns and rows of your splits, so I'm going to put three splits, two columns and one row, so I just added more points where I can manipulate it.

I'm going to let C drag this to the side, to this side, drag the corners up a little bit and I think I want to bring that to the front so it overlaps the cake and shows that curve, okay, so you can see that. The shape has now changed a little bit from its original and let me tell you what these other things do in this wart panel so that you can, if you click on restore original shapes, you can take it back to where it was at the beginning before you applied. any warp and if you click release warp, that will commit the warp and remove the grid, so if you click on a shape you've worked on once, you'll see all those warp controls if you click on it one more time . will hide the warp controls and you can do things like move the entire design and this one, let's see, we'll just rotate it a little bit and push it around to add a little bit more stretch to it and then whenever we want. the design that we can make the, so I'm going to drag this other original cake so you can see them side by side, how one has a little bit of good, it's just symmetrical and it becomes cute, but this other one has a lot more personality, so I'm going to move on.

I'm going to do this as a print and cut and I already did it for you so let's assemble it now so as I mentioned I already posted the warp then printed and cut the cake so I cut it using my printer and then my cameo and this card is just layers like we've done before there are different rectangle shapes and I added some extra little cutout designs and I added a little bit of adhesive the foam adhesive to make that kind of pop so I added a little bit more of foam adhesive on the back of this print cupcake and I will center it there and that makes a very cute and whimsical birthday card the final specialty.

The tool we are going to cover is the taper tool, this is only available in Silhouette Studio Designer Edition plus or Business Edition. Software updates are a big investment. If you enjoyed the design look of Silhouette Studio, we're going to warp a design so that it doesn't end up crooked when we apply it to a tapered or tapered surface, so when you apply something straight like this tape to a tapered surface, if you try to apply it inline straight, it will actually curve as you apply it and it curves. to fit the surface, then what the warped tapered hole does is warp the design perfectly to offset that curve, all you need to do is create your design and connect the containers.

Measurements will work a little bit more with text and modify the tools for this project, so in the software you can use any font and layout you want, but in this example I'm going to use a premium font, a duo of premium fonts from the silhouette design shop called mysteri font duos, they are great to use together when combined. two different fonts and this one has some extra glyphs, so we'll start with the text tool on the left, click down to create a cursor on the page and then we'll type the text. Now we'll click on the text tool again. to start another word and we're going to type okay, now we're going to open the text style panel, select the word stay, let me zoom in a little bit, select the word stay and we want the font to be called domain script.

This is another one that I bought at the design store, so I can start typing it in the text field and then I'll click on a mystery script below and then we'll select the word cool and we want a master hand. we will choose that one from the list now some font variations that come as a set will be listed separately like these are here some fonts if you can't find the different varieties just click on this drop down arrow and Sometimes the additional fonts with that set They will be listed here. This is a mystery.

We have a set of glyphs or special characters called amis teri extras. Now, if you have Designer Edition or higher, you can easily view glyphs directly in Silhouette Studio. We will click. that middle tab for the glyphs and I'm going to go ahead and change my slider to make those glyphs a little bit easier to see and then I'm going to start a cursor with my text tool and I want to change the glyphs to domain extras. and I want this first little kind of welcome mark, so with my cursor on the page I'm just going to click on that once to get that little symbol and I want to get another cursor and I'm going to choose the dotted line right here.

Now, if you're working with the basic edition of Silhouette Studio, you can still find glyphs, but you would do it through the character map on Windows or in the font book on a Mac and then once you have those characters in that other software, you can just copy and paste them into your silhouette

studio

workspace so you know the characters here are the exclamation point and the period, so now I have all my elements here for the mug that I'm going to create and just I'm going to color. and resize it so that this remains. I want it to be 2.3 inches Y and I want it to be dark pink, so while it's still selected, I'm just going to choose pink from my fill color and quick access toolbar and then whatever cool color I want.

It should be about three inches wide and I want it to be black, okay, so I want to drag them together. I want them to be too cold and I want them to overlap slightly, so I'm going to go ahead and center them together and I want to stay in front, so I'm going to click Bring to Front on the quick access toolbar. Now the layers can be seen on top of the black and I'm just going to push them down a little bit, okay, and so on then. I want to color these other glyphs the same dark pink and I want to resize this splash mark to about 1.8 inches tall and I want the dotted line to be about 1.7 inches wide, so the splash mark I'm going to replicate it. mirroring a copy, so I'm going to open up my replication panel and I'm going to choose mirror right and then I'm going to drag it here to the other side of my layout and then I want to keep the group together after I've aligned them, so I'm going to hold down the shift key to select them both at the same time and a top line and click on the group and now I can center all of these at the same time.

Okay, now for my dotted line I want to make some copies, so I'm going to select that and use my Ctrl or command and arrow key to make one on the left and my Ctrl or command I'll select the middle one again and Ctrl or command arrow to the right, so I have three of those lined up. in a row, I'm going to group them together and then I want to make a copy to place over the text, so I'm going to use my control or command and arrow key and just drag it up and reposition everything so that it shows. okay and then I'm going to center everything and that looks pretty good, so now I want to use another big layout tool to make a cutout for this top word and just place it in the middle of the black word and like that I'm going to go to my panel of compensation.

I'm going to select the word stay and I want to choose offset and put a distance of zero point zero three zero and click Apply to have the little thin outline around the stay and I'm going to use that part to cut this word underneath, so now I'm going to go to my edit panel and make sure I've selected just the word offset and I want to make sure it's at the front. of my other text, so it's going to cut off that text below us, so I want to bring it to the front and then I'm going to hold down shift to also select the word cool at the same time and now I can use subtract in the modify panel, so which will be cut using the front shape to cut the back shape, okay, it's cut just the way I want it, the parts of the bottom layer that were covered by the top layer are gone, while those are all selected.

I'm going to go ahead and group them together. Now I'm going to weld the bracket so that those overlapping pieces don't cut into each other, so I'm going to choose to select it and choose to weld and now I have I have everything lined up, let me make sure I have those two. I'm going to group the two words together and then once again make sure everything lines up nicely, so it's actually a really nice design as it is now and you. I could use it maybe to put on a t-shirt or something, it looks great, but we want to step it up once again and we're going to show one more design tool that is available as I mentioned in Designer Edition plus or business edition and that is the warp tool conical, so I'm going to go to the warp panel again and I want to warp this design so that it can be applied to a conical surface.

I'm going to group all of that and now I can choose the second tab for taper, I'm going to move that panel up so I can see everything and with that design selected, if I choose taper selected shapes, that will warp my design and you'll see if you zoom out, you can see this outside. The border shows your border so you can see what's going on,so we're going to enter the dimensions of our container so we know that my container at the top is 3.75 inches and at the bottom it's 2.5 inches wide and six inches. tall, so I connect them and you can see the design curves a little bit as you change those dimensions now.

If you want to resize your design after you've applied a warp, you don't want to resize with the corner handles. Do that with this center section here, this is how you resize a design that's already been warped and then we can adjust the vertical position with this bottom slider, so we'll just slide it until it looks vertically centered when we do that. Now we're ready to commit, we just click Apply and we're going to select everything and group it and now we're ready to cut the design and with a layer design like this, I actually like to cut my fill color, so let's go. make sure our page setup panel is set to the vinyl that I have ready to cut so in the page setup panel my vinyl is 6 inches wide and 4 inches tall and then we can center it on the size of page we want.

We've created it by choosing Center on Page with our alignment tools in the quick access toolbar and now we're ready to go to the submit panel, we're going to go to the tab that uses a fill action and that allows me to tell the Machine when and where to cut based on the fill colors we have used on the page. Now you don't need to cut the vinyl this way, but it works well for a design like this, so if I want to cut the pink first. I'm going to drag this pink box to the top and I want to set my material to be vinyl.

We're using gloss vinyl and I want to make sure my action says cut and my tool is set to auto blade for my cameo. three now I don't want the black to be cut off, so I'm going to uncheck the black box and you can see that the bold lines are gone for the black, the bold is only on the pink and that's the only thing. that will be cut off when I submit it this time. You'll also want to make sure that the other colors are not checked, so we just want to cut the pink so that the pink is the only one that has a checkbox, so what I'll do is load it. a six inch by 4 inch piece of pink vinyl on my mat and I load it into my Cameo and then I'll click send here in the shipping panel when I'm done cutting, I can download the mat, I can remove the vinyl and then I would Uncheck the pink box and I would check the black box so you can see that only the black lines that the black shapes are going to cut and then I would load the black vinyl onto my cameo mat, put the mat in the machine and click send and from that This way I don't have to move anything on and off the mat, I can just choose which color to cut at a time, so I cut these pieces with my Cameo and I'm just going to weed both colors and then use transfer tape to apply it to my curved surface, so after I've removed both colors, I'm just going to use transfer tape to pick up one layer and I don't need to use any kind of registration marks to line them up because those shapes are going to fit together nicely, so I'm going to grab the pink one first and then I'm going to align it where it belongs on the black because of the clipping that we did with that offset, it was very easy to see where so now I have my two layers on a piece of transfer tape and we can apply it to the tumblr and because when we choose the warp tools we had that centered vertically on the tumblr shape, we can center it vertically on this mug on the tumblr press it down in the middle first and then smooth out the words and instead of that sticky tape curving up, it will go straight and leave that nice shape, Let me remove the transfer tape and we don't have any curves. lines, it just looks nice and straight.

We've covered many design tools in Silhouette Studio as we work with library designs in their original state and modify existing designs as we create a project from scratch with drawing and text tools and, as we explore some specialized design tools, as Practice these techniques, you will gain confidence in your design skills. If you need to know more about any of the Silhouette Studio tools I've covered in this class, be sure to check them out. Check out our other instructional

video

s on the Silhouette YouTube channel. You'll also find tutorials on the Silhouette 101 blog. Finally, you can contact the support team at Silhouette America.com.

Thanks for joining me. Now practice your design skills and make something amazing.