Transcripts
1. Create Paper Cuttings on Your iPad in Procreate + Digital, Hand Cut, and Cricut Machine Cutting: Hi everyone. I'm [inaudible]. I'm an artist, designer, and teacher. Today, I want to show you how to make both digital and real paper cutout designs, just like the ones you see here. We'll create the designs on an iPad in procreate, and then use them to make digital images and printable images for cutting by hand or with a cutting machine. I'll show you all three options so you can choose what works best for your personal style. When you take this class, you'll get all the brushes and stamps I use to make my projects, including some pattern brushes, silhouette stamps, and templates. First, we'll turn a silhouette of an animal into a pattern cutout design. I'll show you how to use geometric shapes to break up the space and how to fill a shape with a pattern. We'll cover how to create patterns and pattern brushes so you can turn your own custom pattern into a cutout. Next, we'll create an intricate mandala shape and cover how to create both positive and negative shapes when you're designing your cutouts. I'll show you how to apply color and shadow to the digital images so you can post them online or you use them as a way to mock up your final cuts on paper. Next, we'll create a multi-colored cutout combining text and hand-drawn plant forms. I'll show you how to use a simple silhouette to create an eye-catching pattern around text and give you some ideas for plant forms that you can use in your own project. The great thing about this process is you can turn almost any image or text into a beautiful digital or paper cutout. These projects are perfect for creating greeting cards, wall art, or for just posting on social media or your website. Turning your artwork into a cutout is a great way to make your lettering or illustration stand out online and in person. All you need to take this class is your iPad and the stylus. I'll be using the Apple pencil, but you could use any stylus or even your finger. I'll also be using an X-Acto knife and some 65 pound card stock as well as a Cricut cutting machine. You don't need those to take this class if you only want to make the digital images, but I will be going through my process for cutting by hand and using the Cricut machine. Let's get started.
2. Downloads and Inspiration: The first thing I want to do is show you how to get all of the downloads that you'll need for this class. You can find a link to get to this page in the About section of the class. The About section doesn't show up on the Skillshare app, make sure you go to Skillshare in a browser and then click on the "'About" section. You can scroll down past the class description and you'll see the link to get to the downloads there. You will need a password to get into this page and I'll show the password on screen right now. Once you get into this page, you'll see all the class downloads. The first one that you'll see is the brushes for Procreate. When you're ready to download those, you can click and hold. I'm doing this in Safari. If you have trouble in Chrome, try this Safari. I'm going to click "Open in a new tab". Once that new tab opens, you should see Open in Procreate, if you don't, click "More" and then find Procreate on that list. If there's a problem with Procreate, you may need to update your version of Procreate or your iPad. I'm going to click "Open in Procreate", and then it will just open whatever you had opened last. I'm going to click on a document, click on the brush set, and then at the very top of the list you should see a new brush set called paper cutting. If you want to drag that lower in your gallery, you can do that. You'll also see a few other resources on that downloads page. You'll see the Pinterest inspiration board, some image resources that we'll be talking about in the class, all of the Apps that I mentioned in the class, and then all of the materials that I use in the class, including my paper and my cutting materials. Let's go ahead and look at the Pinterest inspiration board. You'll see, if you look around this board, there are so many different ways to approach paper cutting designs. You can do something really thick with just a few big cutouts like these birds, or you could do something really intricate, it just depends on how ambitious you are with this piece and how much detail you want to put into it. If you've done paper cutting before, you probably have an idea of how much time this takes. Something like this, if you actually cut it by hand, would take quite a while, maybe four or five hours, maybe more, depending on the size. But if you're doing this just digitally and you're not going with the actual cutting option, then you can really go for any style. You can see there are a few different approaches. You can cut out the negative space, you can leave only the positive space like this piece, or you can do a combination like this piece, sometimes the plant is positive and sometimes the plant is negative. We'll go over both options so you can try them both then see what works best for your style. When you're ready to get started with this piece, you can scroll through this board and just see what stands out to you. You may want to start with something simple that just has a few big pieces cut out like this giraffe, you could even start with a family portrait working from a photograph, or you can go and do something much more detailed with some text and a lot of different illustrative pieces and textures. You could start really small, this piece fits in the palm of your hand, or if you want to really go big, you could do something big and detailed like this. If it's your first time cutting, I might recommend starting with something somewhat simple, may be like this that has a few large pieces and then a few intricate pieces, just so you can get a feel for how the process works before you dive into something big. I also love these pieces where the silhouette is filled with patterns. You can start thinking about what kind of silhouettes do you want to work with, it could be an animal or a person, or a symbol, or shape? You may want to start by just brainstorming a list of things that you might want to draw. You could make a list of insects, birds, this page just gives some ideas. You maybe find one idea from here and then go with that and make your own version of that piece. Obviously, we don't want to copy any of these people directly, but this is a great way to get inspiration, just to see what's out there and what are all the options with paper cutting. Another thing you can think about is layering options. If you're just not sure where to start, you may want to start with just compiling a bunch of things you like, maybe a bunch of platforms or animal forms or shapes, and then you can compile those on the page. Really, the first step is figuring out where do you want to go with this? What kind of content do you want to create? Maybe some silhouette ideas, or just the list of animals, plants, people, words, anything like that to get you started. Let's go ahead and get started on our first project.
3. Silhouettes and Stamps: For this first project, we're going to create a simple shape to go on a greeting card. I'm going to use an elephant. But you could use any animal or person or word, any shape that will be a nice silhouette that fits your personal style. We're going to use some pattern and shapes to break up the silhouette and make it a little more of an interesting cut. Then we'll use procreate to markups and different color options before printing on paper. So if you just want to use the digital image, you can stop there, you don't have to do the cutting part. These are really beautiful digital images as well, and I tend to use both. If you do want to try the paper cutting option, I'm going to cover both the exact to knife cutting by hand, as well as cutting with the cricket machine. Both are great options. Obviously the cricket machine is more expensive, but it's a lot faster. I want to show you both options so you can get a feel for both the cutting by hand, cutting with the cricket machine, and doing the digital process. So to start this project, I'm going to open Procreate and then click the Plus symbol and click "Create Custom Size". I'll choose inches as my measurement, and then I'm going to decide based on my paper size, how I want my Canvas to be oriented. I'm going to fold my paper this way and have my image horizontally. But you may wanna do yours this way and have your image vertically. It just depends on how you want this to end up and you can always rotate your canvas later. If you're just doing a wall print, you could go ahead and do a 0.5 by 11. But for me, I'm just going to do the front part of my cards, so that's going to be 8.5 wide by 5.5 tall. I always work at 300 DPI to get a high image quality, and then this is always set to RGB and that's fine. Next I'll click "Create". So now I need to find a reference image that will fit nicely on this Canvas. I'm going to go to Safari and open Pixabay. This is a site that has images that are free for personal and commercial use, and I also made a list of a lot of image resources and there's a link to that on the class resources page. So you can find vintage images, modern images, all kinds of photography and drawings that are free for personal and commercial use. I've already logged into the site because if you log in, you can download high-resolution images. It's a free account, whereas if you're not logged in, you can only download smaller images. You may want to go ahead and sign up if you know you're going to be using this site a lot. I'm going to search elephant and just scroll through and find a nice image that would make a good silhouette. I really like this image because it has the tasks. It has a lot of variation and one of the legs is up, so that adds a little bit more variation than some of the others had. I probably won't include the baby in this piece just because it would make the cut out a lot more complicated. I'll just have that main image I'm going to click "Free download" and then choose the largest size here and click "Download." Then it'll just pop up in this other page, you can click and hold and click "Save Image". I know it works like this in Safari or maybe a little different and Chrome. If you have trouble in Chrome, just switch Safari. Next I'm going to go back to procreate, click the "Tool Symbol", insert a photo, and then find my elephant picture. As I'm resizing this, I want to be sure the Magnetics is on, so I don't distort the proportions of this animal. I'm going to make this really large on the page. But also keeping in mind, this is going to be a greeting card that I want to have a lot of extra space around the edge just to give the image a little bit of breathing room. Next, I'm going to reduce the opacity of this image by clicking on the Layer, click the end symbol, and then bring down the opacity. Now on a new layer, I'm going to get black as my color, and in the brush set I'll choose monoline, and that's just a basic solid brush. I'm going to go all the way around the edge of this elephant and just make a single outline. It doesn't have to be a single brushstroke, and you can have little pieces that go in like this as you're tracing, that's fine because we're just going to fill it with a solid color. Just take your time. Get a lot of variation in this swine if you want to have a nice varied silhouette. I'm going to leave the tasks out of the swine and just go with the trunk here. You can see I try not to keep my pen still at all. I try to move it around a lot because that just adds so much more variation to the outer edge of the silhouette. Once you finish that outline, you can just click and drag from the little color dot to totally fill that shape. I'm also going to change the tail a little bit here because that's just not going to work well for my cut out. I'm just going to improvise the tail shape, so that it's hanging back and that'll make a more interesting cut out then if it's hanging in this way. I'll take just a minute to make that a little bit more variation. Once you finish your silhouette, you can go ahead and make that original picture invisible. You may want to click the Move tool and flip it horizontally, maybe wanted to go the other way. I also don't like how her feet are angled. So I'm going to click the "Magnetic tool" so that I have freeform moving on and just turn this a little bit so that it's more of a straight line that she's walking on. You may have to make some adjustments to your image. If it's not perfect, feel free to make some changes. As long as you're using an image that's okay for personal and commercial use from those sites, then it's fine too make some changes. Obviously the best option is to work from your own photographs. If you have photographs of the things that you want to cover, like your dog or bicycle, those would be the perfect images to use because you can really create an image that's perfect for your card rather than trying to fix an image that isn't quite right. One thing I always like to do at this stage is, save this image as a brush because I may want to use this later on other cards or other illustrations. So when I do a piece like this, I always save it, so that I have this in my toolbox. I'm going to click Share, JPEG, Save image. So now I have it saved as a solid image. I'm also going to go and turn it into a brush. You can easily do this by going to the paper cutting brush set, go to any of these stamp brushes. I'll just go to the circle brash, swipe left, click "Duplicate", click on the "Brush", and then click "Insert photo". Then I'm just going to insert that image that I just saved and then retitle it. I'm going to call this elephant 2, because I've already created one elephant, and then click "Done". Now I have that saved in my brush set. If I ever want to use this in another illustration, I can do that. I realized after I filmed this class, that the brush I created here is distorted, and that's because I made it on a horizontal Canvas. I usually make my brushes at 10 by 10 inches, and I realized that that is really important for procreate. Rather than doing it the way I did it here, make your stamp brushes at 10 by 10 inches, and then you can use them on any size Canvas and they won't get distorted.
4. Creating Cut Lines: I went ahead and included in the brush set, several different brush stamps that you could use for this project. Feel free to use these for personal and commercial use. We have an elephant, a bird, a butterfly, dragonfly, monstera leaf, heart and a circle. We'll use a few of these in the class but the others, feel free to use those as well. If you want to use one of those stamps, you'll just go to the stamp. Then you may need to adjust the size over here depending on what size it's set to, currently. Depending on your canvas,it may lay down sideways. You may have to turn it or turn your Canvas. I like that size. I'm going to click the move tool and rotate that. Then just get that in the very center here. Before I start turning this into a cut-out, I want to consider this, my original layer. I'm going to delete all the layers I'm not using, so I am just working with that one original layer. I'm going to duplicate that layer a few times. You can see I'm going back to the bottom layer when I duplicate, swipe left and click duplicate because I want to always duplicate my original. Never duplicate a duplicate because it just gets more and more blurry each time you duplicate it. I'll just duplicate that original a few times. Then I'm going to click on it, click rename and call it original. Then also I want to lock that layer so I'm going to swipe left and click lock. Now that layer is protected and I can play around with all these other layers and I don't have to worry about losing my original. Now I can start playing around with options for these cutouts. I'm on the first layer here. I'm going to grab my eraser tool and get the monoline pen, and then just set a size that I like. As you think about these pieces, think about black as the cut-out, and white as your paper. Whenever you draw or erase a white line, you want to be sure that line is thick enough that an actual piece of paper could withstand that cutting. To show you an example here, if you look at this piece, these lines are somewhat thin. But I'm using a machine cutter to do that. If you're cutting by hand, you may want to go a little bit thicker because it's just going to be really difficult, especially if you're new to cutting, to get that line perfect without breaking it. I would probably go with something pretty thick like this in the beginning. Then as you get more and more into this, you can go deeper into thinner lines and a lot more detail. This is one way to break up your silhouette. I'm just clicking and dragging and then holding to get a straight line. The nice thing about this is it creates all these interesting shapes across your Canvas. This is going to be totally different for each shape, but this is just one option here. I'll keep going like this. As I'm doing this, I'm keeping an eye on all these little areas that it's creating. For example, that little area there, is so small. If I release my pen, that would be really hard to cut out with an X-Acto knife. I'm going to keep an eye on places like that and make sure I don't create any tiny little cutout areas that just wouldn't be possible. That's our first option, just horizontal lines going across in a chaotic pattern. Let's make that elephant invisible and go to our next option to try something else. I'm going to click the tool symbol, click Canvas, turn on the drawing guide, click edit drawing guide, and adjust the grid size down here. I'm keeping an eye on these lines. I want to decide if I'm making horizontal lines across my elephant, how thick do I want them to be? I'm going to go with 87 pixels here. But it really just depends on your personal style and you may want to try a few different versions, a version that's really close together and a version that's further away. I'm just going to click on one of these lines and drag and then put down two fingers. That's going to make this be perfectly horizontal. You'll see if I drag this across and I have it not horizontal. Then I put down my two fingers. It's going to turn it to perfectly horizontal. I just continue that same process all the way down my elephant. Now that I've done all those lines, I'm going to turn off my drawing guide so I can really get a look at this. That will be an interesting cut-out for almost any shape. The only danger area here is this tiny little strip. If you're leaving this as a digital image, you don't have to worry about stuff like that. But if you're actually going to be cutting this out and you're not going to be using a cutting machine, then you probably want to fix an area like that. You could add a little bit more black in that area, or you could totally redo your lines so you don't have anything on the edge like that. I'm happy with that version, but I want to try a few different options as well. I'm just going to go through each of these layers and just play around with some other erasing techniques that I could do. Also I'm always using an eraser. I'm never drawing. You'll see why this is important once we get into the process of turning this into a cut-out. You can see with this one I'm just dragging a line and then holding for a second. Procreate makes that perfectly straight line. I'm just doing this randomly to create a geometric pattern. I think this would work well with almost any shape. You could do this with text even. It really creates a nice modern geometric look for any shape. I think this looks especially nice with animals. But also I think you could make this work with flowers or really any silhouette like a person's head or a dancer. Anything you can come up with that would be a nice silhouette. This is one of my go to ways to break up a silhouette. You can keep going with this. You could do a 100 lines, but you do want to keep in mind if you're going to be cutting this by hand, you don't want to cause yourself too much work if you don't have time to do that, if you do have the time, then go for it. But if you're doing this as a digital piece, why not make it as intricate as possible? If you are using a cutting machine as long as you use the right setting, then it is also possible. That's one of my favorite versions so far.
5. Creating Simple Pattern Brushes: Let's do one more type of fill for this. We're going to do a pattern. I'm going to go to my gallery and create a new document. I'll set this custom size to 10 by 10 inches and click "Create." One way to make a really simple pattern to fill the silhouette width is to use the quadrant symmetry tool. I'll click the tool symbol, "Canvas", turn on the drawing guide, "Edit Drawing Guide", "Symmetry", and then you want "Quadrant" down here, and then make sure assisted drawing is on, that's going to assist you to do a quadrant symmetrical piece, and then you can change the color of your grid lines if you want to do that, and then click "Done". Next I'm going to choose a monoline thick brush and that comes in the set. I'm going to set this to a large size because this is a very zoomed in version of this pattern. I'm just going to take a minute to make a really simple shape here. I'll start with a simple interior and then go for a larger one, and then an even larger one. I'm trying to touch the edges here because I want this to be a continuous pattern. This edge will match up with this edge and the top edge will match up with the bottom edge, this is really just the interior shapes that I'm creating here. I'm happy with that, I'll click "Share", "JPEG", "Save Image", and I'm going to turn this into a brush. One thing I want to note before we move on here is you have to have these pieces touching the edge because this black part will be our paper. The paper needs to connect to the other parts of paper or it'll just fall out. You'll see what I mean here when we create this pattern. I've saved that image, I'm going to go to any of these patterns and swipe left and click "Duplicate", then click on that pattern brush one time, here we're going to insert the pattern into grain source. When we made our first stamp, we used shape source but here we're using grain source. I'm going to click "Insert a Photo", click on that image that I just created, and then let's make this invisible and go to a new layer. I've got my shell, my new pattern, let's call this circle pattern that I just created, and then swipe that across the page. Now you can see here, the black is what we'll cut out. You can imagine if you had a knife right now and you cut this and this, and this, and these interiors, and all those little pieces, this works because the paper is connected in every area, the paper always has to be connected. For example, if we had a part of this pattern that was like this, this wouldn't work because that piece of paper would just fall out if you cut this space around here. That's just something to think about as you make patterns to fill for this, every thing that's white needs to connect. It seems a little backwards because when we created our brush, we created it in black, but then when you look at it here, it's in white. That's just because when we create this, I click "Invert Grain" and it just switches the black and white. All you need to really worry about is black should be cut out and if it's not, and you're looking at your brush, click "Invert Grain". See here the line is black, that's not what we want, we want the line to be white, which is our paper color, I'll click "Invert Grain" and then that's correct. This takes a little practice and just to wrap your head around the idea of negative, positive, but I think you see what I mean. If you have any trouble with a particular pattern, just e-mail me or contact me and I'd be happy to take a look at it for you. The next thing I want to do is use my pattern. I'm going to go back to my gallery and I'm going to go back to my elephant composition. I'm on my last elephant here and I want to apply this pattern to my elephant. I'm going to create a new layer and get white as my color, then I'm going to go to that pattern brush that I just created and just swipe it over that elephant. You can see here the black is drawing and that's the opposite of what we want. I'm going to go to that, click "Invert Grain", and now the white is what's drawing, that's the paper. That's perfect. I don't like how big these are, I wish that the pattern was a lot smaller. I'm going to click on that brush, click on ''Grain'', and then just reduce the scale a little bit, and then I can fill that with a different pattern. You can see how it's really just a matter of playing around with the scale and the grain to get a shape that you really like. I have noticed that these patterns don't look great with animals or things that are really intricate, if you do a pattern piece, you may want to use the circle style that's in the brush side. You can see if we apply that same pattern to the circle, we get a slightly better result, that might be a nice front for a card. You can see I created a few other patterns that you can try.
6. Creating Complex Pattern Brushes: You may also want to create a pattern like this that isn't made using the quadrant symmetry tool. This is more of a traditional repeat pattern, so that's really easy to make as well. I'm going to go back to that same 10 by 10 inch document that we were working on before, and I'm going to create a new layer, and I'll go to canvas, turn on drawing guide, click Edit drawing guide, and on the symmetry panel, I'm going to click Vertical. Last time, we used quadrant, and this time we're going to use vertical. I'll click Done, and I'm going to get black as my color and the mono-line thick as my brush. Let's work with a 14 percent size brush, what I want to do here is create the shell pattern, and I want the top to match up here with this bottom part of the shell, so the shells are interlocking in each other. I'm going to take just a minute to create a nice curve here, and then I'm just going to have these interior shapes that come all the way down through the center and meet, and you can see whenever I'm making these pattern brushes for paper cutting, everything needs to touch the edge because this is going to be our paper, and the paper pieces always have to connect, or they'll just fall out of the cutout. I want to take a minute to make sure that this will match up, and the way that you know that is here's the top of the canvas, this is going to be down here, so we want to be sure that this line matches this line down here. The way that we do that is by turning this into a repeat pattern, so I'm going to click the tool symbol, click Share, JPEG, Save Image. I'm going to use an app called Pixelmator to create this repeat, I think this app is about $6, but it allows you to create seamless repeats on your iPad, so I went ahead and bought it, but obviously it isn't required for this class. To create a seamless repeat is pretty simple, we're going to click the Plus tool to create an image, I'm going to click Custom, and then down here, I can enter the size. My size is 3000 by 3000 pixels because my document is 10 by 10 inches at 300 dots per inch, so 300 times 10 is going to be 3000, so 3000 by 3000 pixels, that is the dimensions of my canvas. I'll click Create, and then I want to add my brush that I just created to this document, so, I'll click the Plus symbol, click Moments or photos, and then choose that brush, then I'm going to swipe over from the left here, click one time on this image and click Duplicate. I'm going to do that three times so that I have four of these, and I'm going to start with the top one and just drag it up to this corner, and you can see these little yellow lines are appearing, so I want those lines to help me put this in the perfect horizontal and vertical place. There's my first square, same thing with the next square. I'm just going through all four quadrants here. Top right, bottom right, bottom left, and then top left. I'm using these guides as I'm moving these, and I want to get a solid yellow top and bottom, and then I can release, so that takes a little practice, so if it doesn't work the first time, just try it again, give it a few chances and you'll get it. You can see now my repeat looks a little weird, and I need to take this into procreate and fix this up so it repeats nicely. I'm going to click the Share button, send a copy, PNG, and Save Image. Now I can go back to procreate, add, insert a photo, and choose that image that we just created in Pixelmator. Now, this is just our image that we created originally here, moved into all four corners, so that's how we create a seamless repeat. Now, I want to play around with this image so that the interior repeats correctly. We already know the outer edge repeats correctly because we created it here, and now we're going to do the same thing in the center. I'm going to take just a minute here to play around with some options. I want to turn this into an assisted layer so I get that symmetry effect. I'll click Canvas, edit drawing guide, make sure vertical is selected, make sure assisted drawing is on, and click Done, and then I'll take just a minute to get these curves looking good. Now the issue I see, is we've got this little point here, and our little point corresponds with this one down here, and I'm not really crazy about how that happened, so I'm just going to remove it. I'm going to get white as my color, and erase that. But then I also need to do that down here so that we have a nice match up, so what I'm going to do is just follow the curve of this, and you can see my symmetry tool is working, and I'm just going to make this end before the edge of the canvas, so I'll take just a minute to make this smooth, and so I don't want anything touching the top edge or the bottom edge here. The next thing I want to do is fix this little match up issue, we've got this weird little solid line that I don't like. I'm just going to come through and I've got that assisted symmetry on, so it's working on the other side two, and just take a minute to make this look as natural as possible, so I'm happy with that, you can test your pattern at this point by clicking share, JPEG, Save Image, and then go to any of these pattern brushes that I've included in the set. Click Duplicate, click on the pattern, click Source, insert a photo on the grain, not on the shape source. Then let's make all the stuff invisible and go to a new layer, and draw. Now you can check your pattern. For example, I might go through and fix that little point, I don't like that. This is a little pointy, and that's a little rounded, so this is a great time to just play around with stuff like that and refine your pattern. But you will be cutting this out anyway, so it doesn't have to be perfect, you can make little adjustments as you cut, now you get the idea of how to create a pattern brush, and how to apply that pattern to a shape.
7. Applying Color to Cutouts: Let's go ahead and take a look at how to apply some color to these pieces. The first thing I want do is make sure that whatever is black is what I'll cut out, so this piece is actually backwards right now, right now I have whatever is black is the paper. So I'm going to reverse that by going back to my celled circle, getting my eraser, and then I want to erase whatever I want to cut out. You can just test that by tapping your brush, and so here you can see this is backwards, the white is the cutout and I want the black to be the cutout. I'm going to go back to that brush, and click on Source, and click Invert grain. You can see when you do that it changes here. When I erase on my circle, the black is the cutout, so that's exactly what we want, the white is your paper, the black is your cutout. Now, I want to select this black area. I'm going to click on it one time and click Select and now I want to select the opposite of that black, because I want to change what color my paper is, so I'll click invert, so now I'm selecting everything that's white. I'll create a new layer and then choose a color, click on that layer one time and click Fill. Now I've filled everything that's paper with pink, so this would be if I was using a pink paper. Let's say I want a different color paper behind it, I want to change the color of that black, So I'm going to swipe on that layer one time to alpha lock it, and choose my color, click on the layer one time and click Fill. I have a gold layer of paper behind a layer of pink paper. If you zoom in, you'll see there's a little bit of a white haze. What you can actually do if you're working just with a digital image is create a new layer below your pink layer and just click on it and click Fill. We have a solid gold layer and a solid pink layer, and so those two colors are overlaid on each other, I can duplicate my pink layer.. On the bottom version of that pink layer, I'm going to swipe two fingers right to put it in the alpha lock state, click on it one time and actually I want to get black as my color, then click on that layer one time and click Fill. I have a black layer under my pink layer and I'm going to swipe two fingers right to undo the alpha lock because this blurring shadow effect is only going to work if alpha lock is off. I'll click the adjustments to click Gaussian blur and then drag my finger, and you can see as I'm dragging my finger, that number up there is increasing and the shadow is increasing. You can play around here with how dramatic you want to get with the shadow, so I'm just going to go with a light shadow here, and you can also click the move tool and just shift a little bit so that you have an offset shadow. I'm going to follow the same process with my elephant, which is going to be my final project for this first type of cutout. I've got these four elephant types that I created and I really like this one, I think the geometric shape works best with this particular silhouette. I'm going to do the same process, Select this black elephant, and remember I've erased all those lines, so everything but the white is being selected, then I'm going to click Invert, now I'm selecting all the white. I'm ready to fill that layer with the color, so I choose my gold color, click on that layer one time and click Fill. Now, I have my paper color set and I'm just going to create a solid layer below that green layer with a gray, click fill on that layer. I have a solid gray layer and a green layer that has my cutout on it. I'm going to duplicate that green layer, get black as my color, click, I forgot to alpha lock, so you see what happens when you forget to alpha lock, it just selects the entire page. I'm going to swipe two fingers right, then click on the layer and click Fill, then on alpha lock. Click the Adjustments tool, click Gaussian blur, and bump up the blur a little bit, and then click the Move tool. I like to always shift my shadow a little bit so it looks like you're coming out of it from a side angle. This is a great way to just test your colors, and my color palette here is the exact papers that i have, so I just took these little inserts that came with the paper that I bought and I took a picture. If you want to get a color palette in that way it's really easy, just take a picture of those papers, click insert photo, and then, let's move this photo to the very top so I can see it. Then, we can just click and hold and tap on a color palette to get each color. That's what I've done here to get all of the paper colors that I'll be working with. I like doing this because it lets you play around with this before you actually print anything on paper. Let's say, I'm not sure about that green, I can alpha lock that layer, get a different color, click Fill, so maybe the turquoise would be better with this project, or maybe the pink or blue. This is a great time to really play around with color and decide what's going to work best for your style or whoever you're giving this card to. If you're using this as a digital image, you can also apply a little bit of a paper texture to it by just grabbing this paper texture brush here in the brush set. What I like to do is get a color that's slightly lighter than the color that I'm working with on my paper. This layer is in alpha lock, so this alpha lock is checked, and that means I can only paint on the area that's shown. If you're using this as a digital image, you may want to go to both of your paper layers and add just a little bit of texture, and that gives a little bit more grit, a little more realism, so that's totally up to you.
8. Cutting by Hand: If you're actually going to be printing this out on paper, what you want to work with is this black image. I'm going to take this black image, click the Move tool, drag down three fingers and click Copy. Now I've copied that image to my clipboard. I need, create a new canvas that is 8.5 by 11 inches and so this is the piece of paper that I want to print out. I'm going to swipe down three fingers, click Paste. There's my elephant. I want to put my elephant perfectly in the place where I want it to print on my card. If you're taking it to an office supply store to print or if you're printing it at home, it's exactly where it needs to be for your card. If you need to see where your perfect middle is, you can click Canvas, turn on your drawing guide, edit drawing guide, and bump up the grid size down here all the way. Then click Done. That way you can orient this perfectly in the middle before you print it out to the cut. I just went into an office supply store to have this printed. I had my procreate image on a flash drive and I just stuck it in the machine and they let me put in this card stock. This is 65 pound card stock. You can go in and do it yourself. You can also ask someone at the desk to do it, or you can print this at home or wherever you have access to a printer. But this is just standard card stock and I got this at a local craft supply store. I'll put some links to these, on the class page. If you've never done any cutting before, the first step is to make sure you're working with a really sharp blade. Typically when you do paper cutting, you'll start with a new blade each time. Because these blades get to really quickly. If you're having any tearing or any issues you're having depress really hard, then you probably need to change your blade out. I'm just using an exact dough knife and it comes with this replaceable blade system so you can take out the blade and put a new one anytime. Of course you want to have something to protect your table. What I use for this is actually something that came with my cricket cutting machine and it's a sticky mat for cutting fabric. What I do is I'm never going to cut fabric on my clipboard so I'm just going to take this off. This is just the plastic cover that you always keep on it and I'm going to flip this because this side is sticky. I'm going to flip it over. Then the sticky side sticks of the table. I like working this way because I always got really tired of my cutting mat shifting around. But you can also use a self-healing cutting mat. There are all cutting mats out there. If you don't have one, you can really just use a piece of cardboard so you wouldn't want to use wood because that would dull your exact dough knife really quickly. I'm going to stick with this plastic cutting mat and you can just use what you have and of course you can always replace these blades so if you make it dull, it's not a huge deal. I always recommend starting at the center and working your way out. I like to put my finger on the top of the blade here to help me guide it and then slowly drag down. I'm actually going a little bit outside the black. I'm not right on the black area, a little bit outside. It should pop right up and if it doesn't, you just need to go over that area one more time. You can see this is a really tedious process, but it's meditative to you this is a great thing to do while you listen to podcasts. This particular design is really good for practicing your exact dough knife skills. Because the more you do this, the easier it will be for you to start and stop your knife at the right place and you'll notice that it gets easier the longer you do it. I'm just going to take my time here and speed up my camera while I go through this process. I won't cut this whole thing on camera, but you get the idea. You may find that there's a little bit of rough texture or a little bit of the black speckling on that side. You can always just flip it around when you're done and you use this side instead. I do tend to do that if I use the hand cutting method because you're going to see a little bit of roughness over here that's just going to totally disappear when you flip it over. The next thing I'd like to do is add my other paper to the background of this piece. I'll show you what I mean with this orange version of the same card. The first thing I need to do is find the very center of this card. You can do that just using a basic ruler. You can get your ruler in the very center and use a credit card to make a mark in the center. I went ahead and purchased this cutting and scoring tool from the Brand Recollections and has one piece that scores so you know where to fold and another piece that cuts. I think this was like $10 and if you make a lot of cards, this is worth your investment. If you're just making a few cards, it's probably not. What you can do it, this piece is bringing this arm out and then orient your paper right in the middle. My paper's 11 inches wide, so I need to go to five by five. I actually always measure the paper before I use it so my ruler starts right here, at this cut line. If I bring this right to the cut line and look at my ruler, this is actually a hair bigger than 11 inches. It's 11 inches and one tick mark. When I go to 5.5 here on my ruler, I'm going to go just a little bit beyond 5.5 and that's going to be my true center for this piece of paper. Paper is never the exact size that they say it is. It's always a little bit different. I'm going to go to my scoring tool and just go back and forth a few times. What that does is it just makes this tiny little line here so that when I bend this, it just naturally wants to bend at that mark. The next thing I want to do is make this fold really nice and tight. You can see right now it's just puffing up and I just use the enivale little white screwdriver I have. You can also buy a bone folder which is specifically for paper, but really anything hard that isn't going to mark your paper. I wouldn't use a screwdriver that had a black end. Because sometimes those will marks on your paper, but something that's white plastic like this should be fine. I usually fold it the other way too and that just makes for a really strong crease. I've done this same process with my elephant cut out. I'm just going to put this down in the center here. What I'd like to do is glue only the back side and not the front side. Because I like the viewer to be able to open this and see the actual cut out. Then they can open and see what's written on the inside. That's how I do my cards. But obviously you can do this however you'd like. The first thing I'll do is get this all lined up so that the papers are matching well, so you can see there's just a tiny bit of a lip here where the Grey papers just a little bit bigger than the orange paper. I'm going to get out my cutter and cut off that edge. Now I'm ready to apply some glue and I just use this basic Elmore's craft bond glue. It's nothing fancy. You can really use any glue that works well for paper. You wouldn't just want to buy regular Elmore's Glue because that will make your paper cripple little bit so what I'd like to do is use the stick form rather than the liquid and that tends to work better with paper. I'm just going to apply this glue to the back side of my card. I'm going give a pretty thick coat. You can see this is nice for the viewer because they can open the card. You get these gray shadows with the cut-out. They've can see the full cut out and then you can write something on the inside here. That is our first project cut by hand. Let's go ahead and take a quick look at how this would play out with the cricket machine.
9. Cutting with a Cricut Machine: So this is a great section to watch if you're considering getting a cutting machine. I'm going to show you how to open your image in the app, how to save it as an SVG file that'll work in the cricket app. How to feed the paper, and just some basic tips for working with the machine. If you have no intention of buying one of these machines and you're just not interested, just go ahead and skip this video but if you're just curious or you have one of these machines, this is going to cover everything you need to know to print your first card. We've already covered how I created this elephant shape in the previous lessons. I'm actually going to use a different image because this one's a little bit more intricate. You can see that the lines are slightly finer on this one. I'm doing that because that's possible with the Cricut machine, you can get more fine lines. The first thing you need to do is remove any kind of background. This image is solid black image with these lines cut out, and then I have that gray background that I'm just going to remove. When your backgrounds removed, you should just see this gray checkered pattern in the background. The next thing I'm going to do is save this image. Click "Share", and then I want to save this as a PNG, that is file type that's going to have a clear background. I'll click "PNG", "Save Image", and then I'm going to open the Cricket Design app. This app is free when you buy the machine, you already get the app with it. The machines range from I think 150 to 400, and it really just depends on how many features you want to have, but the app is free. I'll click circuit design to open the app and then click "New Project", and then I want to insert my image onto this canvas. First, you need to check to be sure the measurements are the way that you like to see them. So I'll click settings. If you use the metric system, you can turn on metric, but if you're in the US, you probably use inches so you can turn off the metric. I think that was on when I bought it, so make sure that's off. Next, I want to import my image that I just saved. Click upload and then select from photo library, camera roll and there's my elephant that I just saved. You can see because I saved that as a PNG, I'm seeing this checkered background, which tells you that this does not have a background. We've got some tools here. We can click "Remove" and then click on something to remove it. If I wanted to remove that square or that triangle, I can do that. Click Undo to go back and it says, would you like to revert to the original image? Yes, I just want to go back to my original. You can also erase. I'll undo and go back to my original. You can crop to remove things from your image. But I'm happy with how this looks, I formatted exactly as I wanted it to be, so I'll just click Next. Now we have the option to despeckle. Sometimes if you work from a drawing, there will be a little speckles around it, but working in procreate, usually these images are pretty clean so you won't ever need that. Smooth is an interesting tool, because you can see there are some of the sharp edges here on these corners. If you click smooth, each time you click it, it gets a little less sharp. But also the lines get thinner. I'm going to click "Reset" because I'm happy with how I originally designed this. These tools are really just for editing when your piece doesn't look as you wanted to, but when you make it and procreate, you just make it exactly as you want it to look. You don't really need those tools. I'm going to click "Next", and now it's going to show me two things. The cut image, this is what the cut image is going to look like. Black will be cut out. So if anything looks weird there, go back and start over. Print, then cut. This would be if you want to run something through a printer and then cut it. I'm not using that, so that's just grayed out. I'm going to name this file elephant and click "Done", and then it's just showing me things that are in my gallery. I'm going to click on the elephant and click insert. Now I've got this huge elephant on my canvas. I'm going to click on it one time so I can resize it, and you can see the dimensions here. You remember the size of my card was 8.5 by 5.5. This needs to fit within that, with a little bit of space around it. I'm going to go with seven by five here approximately, and then we can see what it'll look like when we get to the next stage. I'm just pinching and pulling my fingers apart here to zoom in and out. Once everything looks good there, you can click "Make it", and then it's asking me about a previous image that I was using and I'll just click "Replace" because I'm done with that image I was working on before. That usually takes just a minute to load and then you get this image of your mat. So this is what you're cutting mat looks like and you need to place your elephant or whatever image you're using on the mat. But right now it says material size 12 by 12. So it thinks my paper is 12 by 12 inches. Obviously that's not true. My papers 8.5 by 11 inches. I'm going click on that, and then I can just put my elephant into place. Now, I think it looks a little bit bigger on the canvas, so I want to go back and change the size. I'm going to go to Canvas and just decrease that size a little bit and then go to make it again and replace. I want to just redo what I just did to make that size right. Again, I'm setting the paper size, and then I'm going to put this into place exactly where I want it to cut on the paper. The center of my paper is right here at 5 by 5 inches. I'm just keeping an eye on where that is and trying to place that about in the center. With these organic shapes, It doesn't have to be perfect. It can just be close and that's good enough. Once that looks good, you can click "Continue" and then it's going to ask you what kind of paper you're using. You can select from popular materials here, or you can go find a different material. I'm going to click medium card stock, 80 pound. My card sock is actually 65 pound, but they don't have that option, and I've tried it on the 60 pound and it didn't cut all the way through. I use the 80 pound option and that seems to work fine. Now it's telling me to load the tools and the mat. So it's telling me exactly what to do. I don't need anything in clamp A. I need to make sure my blade is in clamp B, and then I need to upload my mat and press the load on the Load button. I'll go ahead and do that, but before I load it into the machine, I just need to attach my paper to this piece. The first thing I'll do is take off this plastic, and I just keep this plastic on all the time because it keeps the mat sticky. Sometimes this mat will get really dirty and you can actually just wash it with soap and water. As it gets slant on paper stuff on it, you can just take it into the bathtub and wash it with soap. I'm just going to position this paper right on the 8.5 by 11 marks. This step is really important and needs to be oriented this way exactly as it's shown on the screen on your iPad, or you can also use the desktop app if you don't want to do it on your iPad. But you just need to mirror exactly what you see on the screen so that the machine knows exactly where to cut. Just as the app said to do, I'm going to print this in the machine. You can just give it a tiny bit of pressure, and then there's this little flashy light here, click that one time. Now the machine will take over. Once it's ready to start cutting, you'll see this little flashing sea sign, and you can just click that one time and it'll start cutting your piece. Once it finishes cutting the machine will stop and you'll get a message on the app that says this is complete, and then you can just click this little button which will just feed the paper out of the machine. Now that this piece is totally cut out, you can see it's made all of the incisions for me, and all I need to do is peel it off the mat. You don't want to peel the paper up like this because that's going to create a permanent bend in the paper and curled up greeting cards don't look very nice. The best way to do it is to actually bend the mat rather than the paper. You can see as soon as I bend the mat, it starts peeling off naturally. You can probably hear it. I'm just going to keep peeling, and I'm going to hold on to whatever most stable. This is the stable end and this is the fragile end. I'm going to hold on to that stable end, and just gently peel. I'm going really slow and watching all the fragile areas. If anything looks like it's about to tear, I will put my finger down there and help it. You can see not all the pieces came off, but that's okay we can remove those over here. You can see these are not really attached by much, it's just a tiny little thread, and so I am pulling these out the back rather than the front because I don't want the front to get damaged in any way. Anything that's just attached by a tiny little thread, I'm pulling that off. For our next project it's going to be a little more intricate, so I'm going to use a different setting on my cricket called the intricate setting, and that is called I think intricate card stock. What that's going do is cut everything twice. I wouldn't have to do this process if I use that intricate setting. It's totally up to you, it does use your blade up faster because you're cutting everything twice. But I've never had to replace my blade, so I can't say that that's a big issue. I found a couple of pieces that I don't really want to pull. I'm just worried they're going to get hurt. I'm just going to pull in my exacto knife and slice that out and it comes out really easily if you just give it a little tiny score on this side of the cut, the back side. You can see that extra step does take a little bit more time, so if you use the intricate setting and it cuts everything twice, then you actually save some time because you don't have to pick all those pieces out. But then you are using your blade twice every time, so it's a little extra wear and tear on your blade.
10. Card Format Option 2: I want to show you a slightly different option for putting this card together. A little bit different than we did the last one but I'm going to start with the same scouring process that I did on the last one. For this piece, I just want to include a half sheet. I'm not going to do a double fold like we did last time. I'm just going to include one sheet in there, and so I want to chop this sheet off. I'm just going to use my cutter to do that. I am using a cutter for this, but you could easily do the same thing with your exacto knife and a ruler. Just hold your ruler across this and cut with your exacto knife like this. I used to always do it that way but I finally invested in the cutter because I make a lot of cards. Next, I'm just going to glue this piece down to the back side of this card. As you can see, this would be a really nice card to give to someone. You can write something here on the inside and they can get a little peek of it when they look at the card. Those are the two options. In the first option, we had a double fold so you can't see the writing from here. It really is just highlighting the cut. Then the second one you can see the writing from the outside, which if you have really nice handwriting, that can be a cool effect. That's my first project. Let's go ahead and move on to the second project, which is a little bit more intricate than this one.
11. Creating a Mandala: In this next project, we're going to create an intricate Mandala shape. You'll see once you make these, there are so many different uses for these cutouts. You could attach it to a piece of paper, and it's a beautiful piece to hang on the wall. You could attach it to a greeting card and it makes really nice shadows on the front of the card. You can also use the digital images, I tend to use both the printed cutout version and the digital images for different uses. It really just depends on your personal style and what your specific use is. Another thing we're going to look at in this class is adding your signature or logo to the back of a card. This is a really nice touch if you sell your work or even if you're just giving it away as a gift, people will really appreciate having something a little special on the back of the card. Let's go ahead and create these Mandalas. Rather than starting this in Procreate, I'm going to start in an app called Mandala kit. This is an app that is free to use and you can have several pieces in your gallery for free. They do offer a paid version which let's you have more images in your gallery and also removes ads. I used the free version for a long time, but I finally paid for the $5 upgrade, because I just got tired of the ads popping up. So you can choose to use the free or the paid version. I'm going to open this app and you'll notice that you have to turn your iPad, you can't work horizontally with this app. When you first download it, you'll be on your home screen, and this will, I think have some images pre-loaded in it. This is your gallery and you can click "Plus" to create a new image. I usually start with the basic pattern because I like to just start from scratch, so I click "Basic" and then I'm going to click that very centerpiece and just click the minus symbol which deletes it. You can add things or delete things. If I click on this pattern, that pattern is selected and I can start editing it. Down here, all your options for editing, we have the amount here. We have the distance from the center and we have the size, so you can easily adjust all of those. Then you can go to the shape tool and you can change which shape you're working on. You can change the size of the border. You can change the opacity of the pieces. You can also change the color, and if you click this little symbol here, you can change the color of the border too. You have a lot of options there when it comes to adjusting. You can also click this middle tool and rotate or change how they're opt around the circle or how they're rotated, then you can reset the angle if you've messed with your angle and you just want to reset it. You can change the scale of the whole group. Then lastly, you can change your background. I don't use most of these tools, I just use the basic tools here. The first thing I like to do is choose a shape. I'm going to work with a really simple shape here, I find that when you're making mandalas, if you try to combine too many shapes, it just gets a little chaotic. But that's just my personal taste, you may have a totally different opinion about that and want to do a total mixture. So it's really up to you. I find that for me working with a single element and using it over and over is easier than trying to use 20 different shapes, for example. I'll show you how I'd like to set up my mandalas. The first thing I'll do is set my color. I'm going to set my border color as black. I'll click this symbol here, click "Black". Then I'll set my interior color as white. As I'm changing this border size, I'm thinking about how thick do I want my paper to be. The black is going to be your paper and the white is going to be your cutout. I'm going to zoom all the way out first, because the thing about this app is there's a limit to how large you can do something, so it's easier to start your mandala from the outside and work in than it is to start from the inside and work out. Otherwise, you'll get to the edge of your mandala and realize you can't create any new layers and then you can't finish it. First thing I'm going do is go to this first adjustment tool and push these with the distance tab all the way out. That's the outermost edge of my mandala, I can't make it any bigger than that. Now I'm going to increase the amount, I think I want to have about 12 of these on the outside and then increase the size. I want to have some big petals on the outside here. I think I'm going to reduce that border a little bit. Now I want to use the same shape again to create a flower petal effect. I'll make sure that layer is selected, click "Plus", click "Clone", so I just cloned that layer. Then I can go to my rotation, and I want to rotate this around just a tiny bit, one click. Then I also want to turn this way a little bit so that it's flower petals pointing out like that. I'm going to adjust this rotation as well. That looks good. Now I'm going to do the same thing for the other side of my flower. I'm going to click on my first layer, click "Plus", "Clown". Then first I'm going to move it over to the left, one click. Then I'm going to rotate it just a tiny bit so that it mirrors that other one. I had to rotate that one all the way round to make that work. I'm going to continue the same process, I'm going to clone that original layer again and I'll bring it into the center a little bit, and then rotate it a little bit. Then I want to change this here so that it's on top of all these pieces rather than behind. So I want to make sure that layer is selected, click on "My Layer" symbol here and click "Front". That brought that new shape I just created to the front. Now I want to make that shape stand out a little bit, so I'm going to increase its border and I'm going to increase its size. You can see how this is really just, you play around with this until it looks good. There is no right or wrong way to do this. You could make a 100 different mandalas and all of them will be totally different. I'm just going to continue the same process doing this over and over with different shapes and layouts. You can see mine, but then you can put your own spin on it and create your own shapes. Also, feel free to copy mine if it's just easier for you to start with copying one, then go for it. Don't worry about copying mine at all. One last thing you may want to do is just create a new shape. You can click "Plus", "Pattern" and I'll bring the distance in so you can see that pattern and I'll change the amount. You can click the shape tool and then just go through and choose a different shape. For me personally, I'm going to use the same shape over and over, so I have a really cohesive pattern. But you could do a different shape for every single layer. It's really just your personal style. I'll speed up my camera here while I continue this process. One thing I'm keeping an eye on as I do this is these little spaces here that will cause problems with the cutting. There's a tiny little hole there, I don't want that to be there because that's going to be a nightmare for me to cut. So I'm just going to make that a little bit bigger so that it fits whatever I need it to fit within that circle without showing any little peaking areas from behind. I want to have a pure black and white image here. I'm happy with how this turned out. I've got a little bit of variation from thick to thin. I've got a lot of little tiny spaces to cut out, but no spaces that are so small that the machine couldn't get them. I'm looking for tiny little specks anywhere that would be hard to cut. This is true if you're cutting by hand or with a machine. The next thing I want to do is save this image. I'm going to click the check symbol and rather than sharing it on social, I want to share here and click "Save Image". I can now take it into Procreate. One last thing I'm going to do before I leave this program, I'm going to go back to home, click "Basic" to create a new image. I want to choose something for my card logo. When you're creating these cards, you may want to put something on the back that just shows your personality. I'm going to choose a shape here to go with my initials, that would be nice to add as my logo. I like this flower shape, I might change it a little bit, but I'm going to go ahead and save it, just like we saved the last thing, and now I can open Procreate.
12. Colors and Logos: Now I'll create a new image, Custom size, 10 by 10 inches. Then I'm going to insert my mondala image, insert a photo and making sure magnetics is selected here. I'm going to make this bigger. What I'm going to cut out for this piece is everything except the black. The easiest way to select all this will be to select the black and then select the inverse. I'll click the Selection tool, make sure automatic is selected. Click one time on the black and that should select all of the black. You also want to check your threshold by clicking and dragging, and the threshold is up here. I'm going to go with a threshold of about 65, and that just controls how much of this image is selected. That looks good to me. I've selected all of my black. Now I can click Invert, and now I'm selecting everything but the black. I'm going to create a new layer. I want to fill that layer with black, so I'll double-click in the black area to get a pure black. Click on that layer and click Fill. Now I'm going to make my mondala invisible. Now you can see exactly what will be cut out on the paper. This time I want to have a positive that's not on a solid sheet, it's a lined image like this. Once you have your mondala cutout created, it's time to start thinking about color. I always do this before I get any paper out because I like to be able to try out the colors on the digital screen before actually using any of my paper. What I'll do is create the interior part of this. To do that, I'm going to swipe right to alpha lock this layer, click one time and click Select, and then click down here, one time you click makes that menu go away. The second time you click inverts the selection. Then I'll create a new layer and choose black as my color. Then click on that layer and click Fill. Now we can make our original cut-out invisible and we've just got that black solid mondala color. Now I can start playing around with color options. First, I'll set a color for my background, and then I'll choose a color for my mondala. I'll swipe two fingers right and choose a color and then click Fill. The nice thing about that is now you can just start playing around with background colors and see what has a nice contrast. I like this combination. I like the darker colors with a light color, but we can also try making the mondala a bright color or a vibrant color and then changing the background. I like that combination and this one. This is a great time to just play around with all your options. I'll take a minute just to choose the color that works for me. I'm going to start with this combination. Now what I want to know is what will this look like on a page? This is also how you would do it if you were doing a digital version. I'll duplicate the mondala layer and then go to that bottom Mondala layer, get black as my color and click Fill. Then I want to swipe two fingers right to make sure that layer is not in the alpha lock state. You can also do that by clicking and making sure that alpha lock is not checked. I accidentally clicked clipping mass, so I just type two fingers to undo that. Now that this layer, this black mondala layer is not in alpha lock, I can go to Gaussian Blur and just add a little bit of a blur, click the Move tool and add a little bit of an offset just to see what that would look like with that color. Then I can play around with more color options, or like we did in the first piece, I can add a texture layer. I'm going to get my texture brush and swipe a layer that's over the background. If I want to try out a texture on the mondala, but I don't want to commit to that texture, I can make sure that mondala is in the alpha lock state. Then click it one time and click Select, go to a new layer and choose my color. I'll just choose white. Click on the paper texture brush, and then swipe all over that mondala. Click the Selection tool to undo that selection. Now I can reduce the opacity of that paper texture because it may just be a little bit too intense for you. So you can play around with the intensity there. Once you decide on a color, you can go ahead and either post this if you're just working with the digital version, or you can go ahead and move on to the cutting step. If you're doing the cutting step, then you're just going to go back to this version to start working on printing out your cutting file. That's the first thing I'm going to cut out. The second thing I want to cut out is my logo. So I'll click Create custom size and choose 8.5 by 11 inches, which is the size of my sheet of paper. Now I want to put my logo here and then I'll glue my mondala on this side. I only want to put here what needs to be cut out and I want to make sure it's in the very center. The first thing I'll do is turn on my drawing guide, edit drawing guide, and bump up the grid size to 100 percent, and then click Done. Now I know my logo needs to go right there. I'm going to click Add insert a photo and get that image that I saved from the mondala kit app. You could use any image here, something you draw a little flower or a symbol or your name or your initials or whatever you want to put here. It just has to be something that can be cut out. I want to do this black solid piece as my cutout, so I'm going to erase everything except for that black piece. I'm going to click the Selection tool, make sure automatic is selected and then click one time on that blue area and drag down three fingers and click Cut. I just cut out that blue. Now I'm just going to go through with my eraser on the monoline thick brush and just erase any extra pieces I see. Also I see this is a little bit jagged, so I'm going to go to a New layer, get my monoline brush, and I'm just going to redraw this piece. This doesn't have to be perfect. This is just decoration to show people who made this piece so you could get out your cemetery tool like we did when we made the repeat patterns to make this perfect. Or you could even create a stamp that is your name or initials or signature, but for this piece, I'm just going to trace this simple flower here. Then I'll just do the color drop tool to fill that in. Now I have a nice solid shape and I also want to add my initials here. I'm just going to go to the Over app and I put a link to this in the class resources. This is a free app and super easy to use. I'll click the Plus symbol, click Transparent to get a transparent background. Click the Check symbol. Then I'm just going to type my initials and choose a font. Next I'll click Color and choose black. Click Size and bump up the size. Now I can save this image, Save to photos, and click Add insert a photo and this pops up in the middle of the Canvas. I'll just use the Move tool to put this right below here. One thing to think about when you're doing a cut out is things that are floating like this will not work. We're going to have to adjust that in order for it to work. What I'm going to do is get my eraser tool, choose a size. I want this to be thick enough for a little piece of paper to go through here. I'll just click and hold to get a straight line and cut that B perfectly, I'm going to put down two fingers to get a perfectly horizontal line. I might do the same thing here just to mimic that style.
13. Constructing Your Card: This will be the back of my card. If I am printing this out, this piece is ready to print. Then the Mandala print on a separate sheet of paper. Since I've already covered that process in the previous video, I won't cover that again. We'll go ahead and move on to the post- cutting stage. This is all cut out and ready to be peeled. Again, I'm just going to curve my mat rather than curve my paper. I'm going to hold my mat tight and I'm trying to curve it more on the area where it's cut. This area down here doesn't matter as much. First I will just peel that big piece off. Then you can see this is already starting to peel a little bit. I'm just going to really gently peel and I'm watching all those delicate areas because those are the areas that can tear if you go too fast. But I use that intricate cut settings, so I think everything's pretty much totally cut here. We're going to try to get an edge that's already coming up because I don't want to make any marks on these. I'm going to go super slow with this, and just do tiny little poles and try not to fold anything. If you can get a hold of a thicker area too, it can be a little bit easier. Once you get past this middle point, it gets easier. It's the first few inches that are tricky. Now I'm going to repeat that same process with the part that has my logo on it. Now you can see it cut my little logo shape out. I can just bend my mat and let it just peel off. I may also save those pieces because you could easily glue that onto another card. I would just really carefully peel those off and save them for gluing to a solid card. Next I'm ready to decide how I want this to look. Looking at this now I can already tell that I would probably want to do multiple Mandalas on this. But for this project, let's just stick with one but you can imagine you could do several different colors of this and combine them. The first thing I need to do is my fold. I'll get out my scoring tool. You can see usually with cards, they don't line up perfectly when you first create them. But then you can do some trimming at the end after everything is put together. I'm ready to attach this to the front. I'm just going to do some tiny bits of glue because I don't need this to be perfectly plastered down onto this paper. I just wanted to be pinned in a few key areas so that the viewer can actually see that this is a 3D object. I'll take just a minute to apply glue in just a a few tiny areas on this piece. I intentionally make these bubble a little bit because I like how the shadows show through. But that's really just a personal style thing. You may not like that at all. Try it both ways and see what works best for your style. Now I have the option to add something in here, and I have that leftover turquoise paper, so I'm going to go ahead and use that. You can see this is a really nice card to present to a friend. You've your nice logo in the back, so if you wanted to sell these or if you just wanted everyone to know who created them, this is a great way to brand or just sign your pieces. You can see this could also be a really nice set. If you wanted to sell these on Edsey or sell them at a local store, you could have a really nice color palette that has these pieces that go together nicely. One last thing you can do with this process is same color cuts. This is a gray cut on a gray paper. You can see this makes a really nice shadow. This could be an art print hanging on a wall. You could do same color or multi-color pieces. You could have this framed or you could just hang it up as it is. I like to just hang it on some close pins.
14. Templates and Plant Forms: For this next project, we're going to create a multicolored image. We'll have one color for the text and one color for the leaves. This is a really beautiful piece for hanging on the wall, and you'll see there are so many different applications for this. This would be a great wedding gift for someone. You could put their names, or a wedding date, or a birth date of a baby, or somebody's name. This is really beautiful as a physical cut out. But again, you can do this as a digital image and it would be beautiful as well. Let's go ahead and create one of these. To start this next project, I'm going to create custom size and procreate. I'll be using 8.5 by 11 inches, which is the size of my paper. For this piece I want everything to be centered around the circular shape. The first thing I want to do, is lay down a circle. I'm going to click black is my color and then get my circle outline brush, and just tap that one time. Might have to make that a little bit smaller depending on the size of your Canvas. Then I'm just going to get that in the very center here. If you need help getting it in the center, you can click Canvas edit drawing guide, and bumps out all the way up, then when you click the move tool, you can use this little dots on the corners to line up with the grid. Then I'm going to turn off my drawing guide because that's a little bit distracting while you're working. Next, I want to add some text in the center of this. For this, you could use any quote, anything short would work well, I'm going to use the quote, eat sleep create. I'll be using the same program I used to do my logo in the last project, this is the over app. I'll use the transparent background again, one-to-one ratio as my sides. I'm going to use all caps for this. I'll click black as the color, bump up the size. I do want to use the whole Canvas because if you make the texts that are really small size and then increase the size and procreate, it's going to get blurry. Create it at the largest size possible and then click Save to photos. Back to procreate, we'll click Add, insert a photo, and then choose that text. I want to make this small enough so that I have space for quite a bit of decoration. I'm making sure magnetics is on because I don't want to distort the proportions of my text. Then I'm just going to take a minute to place that in the Canvas. I'm going to bring back my drawing guide because I want to see exactly where the center of this Canvas is. Now, I'm going to make my circle semi-transparent by just reducing the opacity on the layer settings, then I'm going to click to create a new layer, and everything I draw is going to be in black. This is going to be what I'm going to cut out. I'm going to get my technical pen, which comes with procreate, but I threw it into the set so you have easy access to it. I'm going to choose a size here. This will be the size, that's the thinnest I want to have anything. You're just thinking about here, how small do I want these cuts to be? How intricate do I want them to be? That depends on, are you leaving this as a digital piece? If so, go as intricate as you want. Are you cutting this by hand? If that's the case, then you want to go on the not so intricate side, if you're new to cutting. But if you're using the cricket machine, you can push the limits of the intricacy. I'm still testing to see how far you can go with that. Use your own discretion here. I'm just going to start by dropping in some big leaves. I'm going to space those around the Canvas. When I do these, I like to go large to small. I'm going to first create my biggest elements. Looks like this leaf wasn't totally closed. I'm going to start with my biggest and then work down. I'll start with these really big leaves, and then the very last thing I do, will just be these tiny little dots. You'll see how working big to small, will make it a lot easier to fill in the spaces in a way that looks natural. I'm also trying to be aware of the angles. I don't want these to all look the same, so I'm trying to choose a different angle and direction for each one. You can see I'm looking at the canvas and trying to figure out what direction have I not done yet? I'm trying not to have any that are really similar because they will draw attention to those pieces. If there's a lot of pieces that look really similar. So I zoom out and look for an area that hasn't been touched yet, and look at all the leaves around it and decide what has not been done, what angle or direction hasn't been covered there yet. Now that I have all of those drawn, I want to add a little bit more variation to these and a little bit more interests, especially from a cutting aspect. I'm getting the technical pen eraser on the same size that I was using before. I'm just going to come through and add a vein to each of these. I'm happy with how many of those are on the Canvas. So I'm going to go ahead and work on my next shape. This one, I'm going to do a little vine. Same idea as the last one. Now I'm having to think about the angles of these and my new ones. I'm keeping all that in mind as I create these. For this, I'm just going to do some little bumps. If you're going to be cutting this by hand, it's a lot easier to cut angular things than rounded things. You may want to modify this if you're cutting by hand and do something a little bit more angular, something geometric, especially if you're new to cutting. If you're a pro, then of course, you can just go for it, but when you first start using an X-Acto knife, it takes a really long time to get comfortable with that process. In the beginning, I recommend just doing angular things, doing simple projects to start with, so that you don't get disappointed if something's just way too complicated in the beginning. But of course, if you're working digitally then really any shapes are fine here. For this next shape, I'm going to do a solid leaf. Then I'm just going to cut through it just like I did on the first leaf to create some veins. I'll start with the simple leaf, cut through it, and then just come through and cut through these remaining parts. Remember, I'm always erasing here. I'm never drawing white, I'm always erasing. That's what's going to make this effect possible in the end. I'll go ahead and draw all these solid leaves and then come through and add the veins after. The last thing I'm going to do, is go through and just fill in all these tiny little spaces with either a little leaf like this or a dot. I'll just go through every area and put one of those two things there to fill in the blanks. Another thing I always think about at this stage, is if there's enough space around the text, I don't want the text to be too crowded both for visual purposes and for the physical purpose of having to cut around this for the second color of paper that I'm going to use. One thing I'm going to do, is get the selection tool, click free hand, and circle around a couple of these things that are just, I think way too close and click the Move tool, and then I can make them a little bit smaller and/or I just shift them a little bit closer to those other pieces. I'm going to do that around this bored just to make a little more space here. I'm happy with that layout, so I'm going to remove my circle. With the text, I need to think about how I'm going to break it up because if you look at this text, if I cut this black area out, this white piece will just fall straight through. Even if you're doing a digital piece, you want it to look like a realistic cutout. I'm going to create a new layer, get white as my color, get the monoline as my brush, and I'm going to go through and add some little separators that are about the thickness of these lines. I'm trying to copy that same style. But these are going to be straight lines. I'll go ahead and create the line, then I can click the Move tool and put it perfectly into place if it's not right where I need it to be. One thing that makes this a little bit easier, is making your white layer semi-transparent for now. That just makes it easier to see where these lines meet with the letter. You can choose to do this on all of the letters, or you could just choose the ones that need it, which would be the ones that have these inner parts like this P. I'm just going to do it with the ones that need it, but you could also do it with every letter on the Canvas. For the A, I can just duplicate this line that I've already made and bring it down to this other A. The same thing with the R, I'll just grab the line that I've already made for the p and use that.
15. Applying Multiple Colors: Now we can start thinking about color. I'm going to click "Canvas" to remove my drawing guide. For this one, I'm going to go ahead and set my background first. I think that background I'm going to use orange. Now you can see my white pieces are showing. What I'm going to do is merge all those little white pieces onto a single layer. Then I'm going to click "Select", so I'm selecting those white areas. Now I'm going to click on my text. Drag down three fingers and click "Cut". What I'm doing is cutting that white shape out of the black shape. Now, if I remove the white, you can see the black has this cut out of those white lines. Next I want to add whatever color will be on top of this orange. I'm going to duplicate the flower layer, duplicate the text layer, and merge those new layers together. Now if I make those original layers invisible, you can see I've just got one layer that has all my text and flowers on it. I want to select to that layer by clicking "Alpha lock" and then click "Select". Now the black is all selected, and now I want to click Invert. I'm selecting everything except for the black. I'll create a new layer and choose my color and click "Fill". Now, if I make my black invisible, I've got this blue layer that reveals my orange background layer. Now I want to decide what color I want to take. I'll create a new layer, and I'll choose a color and just create a little circle around this text. I'm doing this on a new layer that's above all of my other layers, and I'm just going to drag that color in, so I've got a solid shape. Now if I move that shape below my cutout layer, I have a multi-colored effect. Now I can go ahead and add my shadow, which will be done by duplicating the blue layer. Swipe up blue layer with two fingers to alpha lock it. Click "Select", choose black as your color, and then click "Fill". I didn't actually need to click select, but that works as well. Now we've got a black layer with a blue layer over it. I'm going to d alpha lock my black layer, and I'm going to go to adjustments, Gaussian blur, get that a little bit of a blur, click the move tool and then give it a tiny shift. Now I can start playing around with the other colors. I'm not crazy about that blue anymore, so I'll fall off that layer, fill it with the new color. I like this bright color better. This is a great time to just play around with color, and of course, if this is your digital version and that's what you're going to work with, this is ready to post. But if you're actually going to do a cutout, then what you need is to go back to that original we created. I'm going to go ahead and cut this shape out of my turquoise paper using my cutting machine. Now that I've cut this out using my cutting machine, I can go ahead and peel it off the paper again, just grabbing the mat and making it into a curve, and then peeling the paper away from that curve. Now I'm ready to put one color behind it. I like to choose a color that's strongly contrasting with the first color, and then I'm going to put this color only on the text. I need a way to measure it to make sure that it fits just behind the text. What I'm going to do is flip this over on top of this gray, and then I'm just going to trace the outer edge of the text and the plain forms. Now, I have a little map that shows me where I can cut, and I'm just going to take a few minutes to go around and cut this out. That looks good. If there's any tiny little areas that didn't make it I can always snip those with a sharp pair of little scissors later. I'll go ahead and glue this on. I'm not going to put much glue. I don't want the glue to come out in between the text. I'm just going to put glue in the biggest areas, and I don't want it to come out past the actual lettering, so I'm just doing it in between the letters and in between each word. You can see I'm just using this little screwdriver to just bump this around until it's in the right place. I got these little sewing scissors that I use sometimes to get tiny little cuts out like this. I'll just take a minute to snip those. You can see these two color pieces take a little bit of extra work because you have that extra step of adding in that color piece in the middle. But I think it's totally worth it. This is a beautiful print and you can hang it on the wall so it shows a little bit of that shadow. You could put this in a frame. I also created another color version because I wanted to see which one would stand out more. You can play around with different color versions. We could even switch these. I actually really like this color version now that I look at those together. You could really create a series of these prints or turn these into greeting cards, wall prints, you could sell these in an Etsy shop or a local store. I think you can see at this point there are just so many different things you can do by turning your procreate drawings in the cutouts. I hope you enjoyed this class and that you feel inspired to start creating your own paper cutout designs. If you liked this class, you may like some of my other classes where I cover a lot more ways to design and paint on your iPad. Like how to create modern folk art using the free downloadable brushes I created. Check this out on my profile if you want to see more. Also I share a lot of free downloads on my website. If you want to get more downloads like the ones you got for this class, check out my site. I would absolutely love to see the project that you create after you watch this class, so please share what you make. You can do that here on Skillshare in the project section, or you could tag me on Instagram or Facebook. You could also join the Facebook group I created for iPad artists, illustrators, letterers, and digital planners. It's a place to get opinions and advice on iPad drawing, painting, and digital planning. Get inspired by digital creations from around the world. If you love creating things on your iPad and want to join other people around the world and conversations, sharing ideas, and seeing each other's work, check out the group. If you have any questions about the process you learned in this class, please reach out to me. You can do that by replying to my discussion here on Skillshare, or you can contact me through my site. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you again next time. Bye bye.
Liz Kohler Brown, artist | designer | teacher | author
