Creating Stickers Using Silhouette Studio

1. Intro: Hi, My name is Tanya. I'm a professional illustrator with over 20 years experience. In this video, I'll teach you how to take an image file and converted into a cut file using Silhouettes studio so you can print and professionally cut stickers that you can sell or just have fun making for your own crafting projects. So join me in class and let's have some fun. 2. Sticker Art Setup: to begin. You can see I have Adobe Illustrator open. This is where my images live and are organized so that they're ready to be turned into sticker sheets. You'll notice that I have several layers here on the right. The top layer is actually the registration layer, so I'm going to just hide this other layer and we'll explain it. So the registration layer is the layer that contains information that's silhouette Studio needs to understand the parameters of the sticker page file. I'm about to import into that program. We run our own successful sticker company with over 800 different sticker sheets styles to choose from. So when it comes to accurate results, we put a lot of time and effort into refining the process and ensuring we would get accurate results for our print and cut files. If you'd rather not go through the process of trying to create your own registration marks , you can purchase this file from us, simply contact us, and we can go from there. So on my registration layer, you'll see there's a square up here. There's a line on the right and then also a line on the bottom. This is what the cameo is going to read, and it's going to connect to the syllabus studio file. The next layer I have is my blocks layer. This tells me how close to the registration marks my artwork can get so that I can fit as many sticker images as possible onto an individual sheet. You can see her. I've got them in red, and there's some that are cut out. That's because if I open up my art layer, you can see just how close I can get. I like to put as many stickers on a sheet as possible so that our customers get value. And these little blocks really help out in understanding just how close we can get to the registration marks without interrupting the cameo from reading those marks accurately. So the layer below that, obviously I've already opened it up. That's the artwork layer. So these air going to be the final stickers when everything is all said and done, and the layer below that is my outside cut box layer. When we hide this block layers, you can see a little bit better. So when the file is complete, what we're going to have is a kiss cut of each individual sticker and then thes outer marks . Here these lines that's going to actually be the dimension of the sticker sheet. So when everything's finished, there will be two sticker sheets that will be printed and cut from an 8.5 by 11 piece of paper. So the last layer I have here is my cut size box, which is exactly what it is. It's a little box that tells me how much space needs to be in between my stickers so that my cut size lines that we're going to add in silhouette studio do not overlap. So in this sticker sheet, there's no worry. We've got plenty of room. It's it's not gonna be an issue. But sometimes when you're jamming a lot of stickers onto one page, you need something that you can just sort of move around and make sure that you've got enough distance between one sticker and the next that when you create your cut lines, that will actually be a little bit bigger than the sticker itself. You won't have overlapping cut lines because that would be a disaster. Okay, so at this point, We're just gonna make sure that the Onley layer that is showing is the artwork layer from your lackeys in the layers Hide on. And what we're gonna do is export this as a pdf. The reason why we don't need the registration marks to show at this time is because we're going to recreate them in silhouette studio. You'll only need the registration layer here visible when you're going to actually print this file onto your sticker paper or if you're trying to align your artwork to make sure that you don't go over those marks. So we're gonna hide that, and we're going to save a copy as a PdF. Now, technically, you can import illustrator files Native Illustrator files directly into Silhouettes studio . However, sometimes salute studio just crashes. Either it's just having a bad day that day or the file is too large. So to get around that you can just say if your file as a PdF and we have had some pretty massive sized files and they so far have not crash silhouette. So that's what we tend to do is save everything as a PdF and go from there, and it doesn't really matter what type of pdf that you save it as because it's going to read it regardless. So we're just gonna click save pdf. 3. Cut File Pre-Setup: So now we're going to move into Silhouettes studio. There are a ton of cool things you can use silhouette studio for In this course, However, I'm going to only focus on the tools you need to know to get your image files professionally. Kiss cut as stickers. I'm using the business edition because we use this for our business and it has all of the cool features needed to get the job done. Right. So let's begin by importing our art file. We can do that by choosing file open or you compress the little shortcut icon. I'm going to click on my pdf and then click. OK, you're going to see a pop up window appear it has a few options in it, and we're going to change them around so we can import the artist vector or as an image. You can see that here, Actually, what we want to do is imported as an image, even though we created an inspector art because we're not technically gonna print from this file. So we're going to choose importers image, and we're going to choose 600 GP I Now you might be wondering, Well, why would you choose out. If you're not gonna print from this file, it's always important to import your files at the highest quality that you can. And 600 is much higher than you would ever need. And what it will do is when we go into create our outlines in our cut marks because Silhouette has a nice, crisp, clean copy of her image, we're gonna get better lines that we're going to get better data to work with. So we're going to imported US image and choose 600 d P. I and you can see there's a little preview of our image here and then click import. So notice at the top that you are in the design tab and your page set up panel should already be open. If it isn't open, then you can just open it by going up to the panel section and then go down and choose Page set up underneath, Page set up. We're gonna work in the design area tab, so there's three tabs across the top. We're gonna work in design area, set up first. If you have a silhouette cameo as I do, you can leave most of these settings as they are. If you have a different silhouette cutting machine, usually all you have to do is turn it on and silhouettes studio will detect the machine, and you can go from there. If it doesn't work that way, simply choose your machine, Matt and media sizes in the three panels that air here. The only setting that we're going to change on this tab is the media size settings, so it's 12 by 12. Currently, we want it to be letter size 8.5 by 11 and you can see that our art board has changed and are cutting. Mat display has changed. So now let's click on the last tab in this panel that's called registration marks. Here is where we'll tell Silhouette studio what the registration marks sizes are for the file we just imported. So first we want to click on so that we can turn our registration marks on and then go down to where it says advanced options and open that that arrow here. It's showing you all of your insets, your left your top. You're right, your bottom inset. What you want to do is change that to 0.400 and do that for all four options, and I'm not sure if you saw it cause it went pretty quick. But on the left we see we now have registration marks that look just like the ones that we created an illustrator. So we're telling Silhouette Studio that these air our new registration marks And when we print out our file from illustrator or the pdf that has the registration marks on there, we'll have the same information coming to Silhouette Studio. So that are cut marks will match up perfectly. So now that we have our registration marks set up, let's move on to the trace panel. If you notice our file, if I click and drag it, everything comes with its really just one big block. And that is not what we want when it comes to editing stickers. So what we need to do is trace out each image, and that's where the trace panel comes in. So we're gonna go and open it. You can actually find the trace pill mill here on the right. It looks like a little butterfly, but if for some reason you can't find it, you can always go up two panels and then choose trace, and now you'll see that the trace panel has been opened. What we want to do is click the select Trace Area button and then left, click and drag and create a grey box around all of our artwork. Even though we're not going to create cuts for the title of the sticker sheet in the style number, you still want to include that in your selection. Then you want to change your threshold to 100% and make sure that the high pass has been turned off. So it says off here, we're good to go. Then go down to the bottom and choose trace and detach. This could take a long time, depending on the complexity of the design. But what you'll end up with is an actual cut out of each image on your page. Okay, so now that it's finished, let's look and see what happens. So we've got this layer now. It's really just a traced piece of paper. It's cut out perfectly. All of the letters, everything that we didn't want. It's cut it out, and now we just have it as this one little piece that we don't need anymore. So we're going to click delete 4. Cut File Creation: So now we're gonna zoom in, and you can do that, either by using the tools up here or by holding down the altar key and scrolling with your mouse and then using the space bar key. It will give you this little grab her hand and you can just pull on your mat so that you can get to the sticker that you're trying to work with. Notice that each image is now completely cut out. Even the letters, all the letters. If I grabbed them, you can see that all these letters, they're all individual little pieces, and that's that's good. I mean, we wanted it all cut out. But when it comes to making a cut file, that's not what we want. So what we need to do is grab this and group it together so we can do a control G on the keyboard. Or if you're using a Mac, I'm not sure what your shortcuts are, but you can always go up to the top and choose object grape. So now that it's group, you can see that the letters are not showing up as individual elements open the offset panel on the right, which is right here with the Little Star, or you can go up to panels and shoes offset and with our sticker selected, what we want to do is choose Theo, offset Button and set our distance to 0.40 and you'll see this. This looks kind of large here. Like if this was going to be a sticker, there is a lot of extra white space wasted around this sticker, and there's individual marks around all those all those letters. But that's OK because we group this image so we don't need to worry about that. At this point. All we want to do is choose if we want, um, like sharp edges for our corners or rounded corners. I'm gonna choose rounded and then click apply and you can see it tightened it up. It brought it into this zero point zero for zero edging, and we have a nice line that goes all the way around our sticker. Now there is a way to adjust the outlines so that when people pull the sticker off the sheet, it's less likely to tear. You can also clean up these outline edges to reduce the number of anchor points, and that will actually make the lines smoother. And it will reduce the the amount of time that it takes for your cameo to cut stickers. You can actually cut stickers a lot faster. It's also going to save you money on wear and tear and blades on cutting mats. If you want to learn how to do all of that, there is another class that we have that will teach you all the steps. It's an advanced cutting class, and we'll go through step by step and teach you how to do all of those cool things with your with your cup files. But for this training class being that this is just a entry level training class, we're going to accept the line as it is and move forward. So with the image selected, we're going to move over to the scent tab at the top, and it's going to show all of your image is outlined in red. No, that is not what we want. We don't want any of this stuff cut. Anything in red means it's gonna be cut, and that's that's not what we want it all. So we're gonna do a control Ada, Select the whole sheet. We're going to change this to cut, and we're going to choose No cut. So now we want to do is grab that little sticker that we put the outline on and come over here and choose cut edge. That is the only thing we wanna have cutting at this point in time. And while we're over here, it updated toe white sticker paper. Sometimes it just does that it detects. But if it doesn't in the drop down box, you could just choose white sticker paper and then make sure that your blade is that to cut . Great. So we've got one sticker ready to cut, but we need the rest of the sheet. So let's go back to our design tab on. Let's continue working on cut marks for the rest of the stickers on that page. Okay, so we're gonna grab the sticker and just capturing the outer edge. We're going to copy and paste that. And now it has duplicated that, and we can just move it over to the next sticker, and we're going to keep doing this until we have a nice row of four stickers. Now you're probably wondering why I have aligned them so poorly. There's a reason I haven't lost. My mind. We want to do is get this one as close to accurately on the left and right. That looks pretty good and then bring it up. We're going to grab all of the sticker cut marks. And then what we want to do is go over to our transform panel, which again you can get it from panels choose transform. We're going to click it over here and inside of the transform panel. You see there's a line options, so we're going to choose a line bottom, and that way it's gonna line everything to whatever was at the lowest, which was this one. And then we're going to choose a line horizontal, and it's just going to evenly spaced all of the middle stickers out so that everything is cutting as perfectly as possible and we send it through the cameo and then, without de selecting, I'm going to do a control G and group that row. So now when I click instead of having to capture all four of these again, copy and paste to do the robe. Lowe, I just have this one Nice A row of four. So we're gonna copy and paste that and we're gonna do it again. I'm just gonna zoom out here a little bit so we can see the whole section of this top sticker sheet and then grabbing all of them. I'm going to align left, and I think this bottom row needs to go down just a tad and then again grabbing all of them . Now I can use the vertical spacing alignment tool and you'll see that it has been aligned perfectly with the other two. So again, without de selecting, I'm going to group thes and I'm going to copy it and then come down here to the bottom sticker sheet and paste and then grabbing the top one. I'm going to horizontally aligned the bottom one to the top and then just using the arrow keys. Adjust this, that it's perfect. Let's see about so we can see what we've made. That looks great. So there's a couple different ways that we can create our exterior bounding box, and this is going to be the the line that silhouette cameo is going to follow to cut out the sticker sheet entirely. Do you have something to hold in your hand? And one of the ways is you could just follow the steps we have done thus far, but this time using that layer in illustrator that showed the exterior bounding box. You could do it that way. Or you can use the drawing tools that we have inside of silhouette. Studio and inside are drawing tools. We have a rounded rectangle, so we're going to choose the rounded rectangle and then just left click and drag it so that we have a nice exterior cut box. And then, using the selection tool, you can just select it and using my arrow keys, I can adjust it. I think I wanted to come down a little bit. It's a little bit tall, and if you have a specific file size in mind, you'll see that there's measurements here, so you could actually make sure that this matches exactly the length and width of whatever you want it to be. Just make sure that none of your cut marks go outside of your registration lines. This is your hard wall. You cannot go past this. Otherwise your camera is gonna have some major issues when it's trying to cut, so that looks good. So now we want to copy and paste that, and we're going to drag it down to the bottom one again. I like using easy tools. So we're going to use this horizontal left alignment will, That way they're just in the same spot on the page is just easier when you're pulling them off the sheet. Okay, so that looks really good. So now we want to go over to the send tab and you'll see we have cut marks for all of our stickers. We also have cut marks for the exterior bounding box. Now, that sounds like a good thing, but we don't want that to cut at the same time as when we do our kiss cuts. So we're going to grab both of those bounding boxes and we're going to choose no cut. We don't want them to cut right now. So now it's time to save your file. You can click, save here, or go to file safe. And I'm just gonna leave it the found a Metis and click safe 5. Print and Cut Settings: Now it's time to print and cut your file so you can print your file either from the adobe illustrator file itself. Or you can open up that pdf and printed directly from there. You just want to make sure that when you print you have the registration marks that you can see here, you want to make sure that that layer has either been saved into your pdf or it's visible inside your illustrator file so that when you print this information is on the pages, well, then you want to take that sticker sheet that you've just printed out and place it on your cutting mat. Let me go back to the design tops. You can see a little bit better the museum out, so you want to place it on your cutting mat just like you see here on screen. So you've got the nice arrow pointing up. You want this little registration mark to be the top left corner, so it should look just like it looks on your display window inside silhouette Studio. Load the cutting mat onto your cameo, and then we're going to go and click on the send tab. So inside the Sun tab. We're going to send this sticker sheet through the cameo doing to cut jobs. The first job is going to kiss. Cut around each sticker and you can see we've already got all of our cut marks lined up here. Everything's good to go, and really sticker paper consists of two layers. So when we say kiss cut, here's what this really means. The top layer of your sticker paper is what you print on, and it has an adhesive sticky back. The second layer is your bottom layer, and that protects the back of the sticker paper so it retains its stickiness. When you kiss, cut a sticker. It allows someone to peel that sticker off the protective back easily. That's why sometimes you'll hear stickers called Peel and Stick because they're professionally cut for easy peel. So we want to go up to our cut settings. Make sure it says sticker paper white, and make sure that this says cut and your blade is a ratchet bleed. Make sure that your ratchet blade inside of your cameo is either set to zero or one. Unfortunately, silhouette blades do. They just don't have consistency with their zero and one settings, So you have to do a trial run each time you get a new blade to determine if it will kiss. Cut properly with a setting zero or with the setting one. If neither work, then you've got a dud blade that you need to send back and get a new blade and test with that. So now that we've got all of our cuts settings complete, what we want to do is send this through to the silhouette by choosing sent, and it's going to kiss. Cut all of those stickers. Once that first cut is complete, we're going to cut the outer edge of your sticker sheet. That's this right here that is going to detach the entire sheet from the rest of the page that has your registration marks on it. Because of this, it's important to always do your kids cuts first, Then do your outer edge cuts. Also, the outer edge cuts can sometimes be read by the cameo as an additional registration line and cause your cut to be skewed. As you can see, the lines here are pretty close to these registration lines, so it's really important to always do this cut second, So to cut the outer edge, simply do a select all by pressing control A and choosing no cut. Then go down to this bottom option and choose cut edge. You'll see now on your page that your individual stickers air no longer going to be cut Onley these exterior bounding boxes So that is perfect going over here to the materials you want to leave. Your sticker paper is white, your blade and cut settings they're all should be just the same as what they were. The only difference is, is we're going to go down to where it's his passes and choose to, and the reason why we're going to choose to is because we actually want to double cut this to try to separate it from the rest of the material on that 8.5 by 11 page, then you want to open up your cameo and change your physical blade to studying number four . This will ensure that your double cut goes through your sticker paper completely. Once that's complete, you should have two individuals sticker sheets ready to use or sell off course. You could make your sticker sheets whatever size you want to get more out of each letter size page. This is just one example 6. Wrap-up and Move to Advanced Lessons: Thank you so much for taking this course. I hope this course helped you get started into the wonderful world of sticker creation. I've been doing this for years now, and I absolutely love it every time I get to make more stickers. If you have any questions, we're going through this course. Feel free to contact me. Thank you again and have fun crafting. 7. Advanced Cut Files: Hi, my name is Tanya. I would professional Illustrator with over 20 years experience. In this video, I'll teach you how to take an image and edit the cut File and Silhouette Studio that you get cleaner cuts, beautiful cut marks, and remove those undesired cuts in places where you don't want your cutter to cut. This is an advanced Cutting class. So if you're new to Silhouette Studio, I recommend you take our intro to sticker making class first so that you understand how to create a basic cut File first. So if you're ready to start cleaning up your Cut Files, save time on cuts and overcome the common cut File obstacles that many people run into Using Silhouette Cameo. Then this is the class for you. So join me in class and let's have some FUN. 8. Advanced Lesson 1: To begin, you can see I've already got Silhouette Studio open and ready to go. The image we're going to work on is this Zoom meeting image. You can see that the letters have been cut out individually from the computer monitor. Before we create a cut mark, we need to group all of the elements that should be part of that single image. Or in this case, we're going to turn this into a sticker. And to do that, we just need to select all of the items. And either do a Control G to group it, or you can come up to object and choose Group. Now you can see that when I select it, all of the letters are no longer presented as individual images. Next, what we want to do is go over to the offset panel. You can find it here on the right, it's this little star. Or you can go up to panels and choose offset. With our image selected. We're going to choose Offset. And then I'm going to set the distance to 0.040. You can either choose to have sharp edges or rounded edges. I prefer rounded for this particular image. So I'm going to click that and then choose Apply. You can notice that the overlapping lines that we are left with are completely gone and there's just one outline around the entire image. Now you could leave this outline as is and send it to the cutter. However, if you notice, when I select the sticker, that outline and I choose this Edit Points button, there's a lot, a little nodes all throughout. That's what these little squares are. In Graphic programs. They're called anchor points. So if you hear some people call them anchor points and others call them nodes. That's why I'm an illustrator by trade. So to me they are anchor points because they behave just like an anchor point in a graphics or Illustration program. For every anchor point you see, your Cameo will adjust the blade cut to ensure it reaches all of those points. Sounds like a good thing. I mean, after all, what you want our accurate cut marks. But in reality this is not a good thing. This slows down your Cutting time and increases the wear and tear on your cutting mats, machine and blades. It also leaves you with cut lines that are not likely as desirable as they could be. For example, as a sticker, having a cut mark that has not been well-thought out will increase the likelihood of the sticker getting torn when pulled off the sticker sheet. And we can actually get the same accuracy of cut marks without having all these anchor points. And that is what I'm going to teach you how to do 9. Advanced Lesson 2: So with our outline selected, we're going to go over here to the left and choose this edit button. You'll notice that you've got some new options here at the top. Let's cover what these tools are and what they can do that we can use them effectively. The first one is to delete an anchor point. So if I go over here and I left-click on an anchor point, I can choose the delete button, and it starts to delete those points. The next button I have here is a break path point. So if I press this, it now has created a red mark and it has broken the path from one anchor point to another anchor point. The next button that you'll see here is the convert anchor point. And what it will do is it will convert the anchor point into a corner point. So sometimes this button works great. Other times it doesn't, it depends if the point is already a corner point or not. But you compress it and it'll make it a corner point if it currently is not. The next one is similar to the last one. This one is your smooth Bezier points. So if I click that, it's going to make sure that you have little handles. And just like a regular anchor point and in Graphic Design Program, you can use these little handles to adjust and make a Bezier path. The next one converts the anchor points so that you get a straight path between the two points. You can see I click that and now we have a straight path between this point and this point. The tool next to that converts the anchor points that you get a curved path between the two points. When I click that, you can see now we have a nice curved Bezier path between the two points. This next tool converts the shape. So if it has a lot of straight lines, it will give it smoother Bezier curves and fewer points. Now this is nice. If you're trying to clean up your file, you can just click the whole thing and press this button and you can see a lot of points have been removed, but it's very random. And for example, if this is gonna be a sticker, you really don't want to cut right in the middle here, which is what this path is telling you is going to happen. Because if someone goes to peel this sticker after you're gonna they're gonna tear it right here. I mean, maybe they won't, but odds are, they probably will and that's not a great experience. Have a torn sticker. So that button helps to reduce the points. But we can do this a lot more intelligently ourselves. And I will teach you how to do that in the next lesson. And then the last option that you have here, this converts the object into a path. So those are the tools that come with all of your anchor point editing ability when it comes to messing with the outline and adjusting your Cut Files. Now what we want to do is start cleaning up our file 10. Advanced Lesson 3: So there are different levels of cut File cleanup. We've broken them into three categories, which will be three separate Lessons inside of this class. We're going to start with the easiest scenario first. So when we look at our image here, we can see that there are some obvious areas we want to clean up so that will get cleaner cuts and quicker cuts from our Cameo. So what we're going to do is start with the words and make sure my first point is selected. And we're just going to delete some of these extra points because they're really not necessary. We don't need them. Especially that cut right in the middle. Then sometimes I like to leave a reference point. So even though I probably won't keep that point, I'm going to leave it and click on the point next to it, and then delete from there. Because we also don't want to lose the amount of whitespace that we have between the edge of our cut outline and the actual image itself. So sometimes leaving just a spot in the middle will help me make sure that I retain that, that spacing. Okay, so we've got a lot less anchor points, which is good. And you'll notice that when I click on an anchor point right in front of it, you'll see a red line. This is telling you that if you delete this point, it's going to impact this point. It's letting you know where the connection is. So it's important to be aware of what you're deleting and what's happening on the page so that you can make sure that you're cut marks come out the way you want them to. And if, let's say for example, I deleted too many points and I needed one added back. I can just take my mouse and click and it gives me a new point. Will keep that one, delete these. We're going to adjust this point that you can just move it around with your mouse, as you can see here. But they also have some really nice features inside of Silhouette Studio. So for example, to try to get that little handle would be difficult to do. You'd have to zoom in and mess with it. But if I just come up to the little smooth button, I can press that. And now I've got both handles easy to work with. It'll actually try to smooth it from one point to the next. Now, obviously that's not what we want because it's going to cut off this little G here. But at least it tries, it does its best. And then we're going to help it with the rest. Delete this point. We're going to use that smooth option again. So it becomes a little bit repetitious. You, you do end up spending a little bit of time with the cut File, probably more than you're used to spending. But the amount of time that you will save every time you go to cut this is well worth the effort because every minute saves when you're running a business or just doing mass quantities of something is a minute you can use to do something else. Next, what I'm gonna do is start cleaning up the anchor points down here at this bottom part. We'll keep that one will get rid of the one next to it. You definitely don't want to have too many anchor points right next to each other. And in one of the future lessons in this course, I'll give you an example of why. I'm just going to pull that handle out, just make sure we get a nice space around the words. Alright? So we went from a gajillion anchor points down to just really a handful. Which means that the amount of time it will take Silhouette Studio to cut this sticker versus this sticker is going to be significantly less because it's really only just having to stop and think at these points instead of every single one. That's over on, on this sticker here. Okay, so that's sticker looks pretty good. We could play with this just a little bit more and firm it up just a little bit. But for the most part, this looks good and it has demonstrated the principles of what we're trying to show. Now what we're going to do is move on to level two and see a more complex design and how to overcome those cut File challenges 11. Advanced Lesson 4: So what happens if you have a more complex design? Let's look at this File and go over how to create a proper cut File for this design. You can see that because of all the whitespace in the middle of this design, Silhouette has interpreted it as an area to cut out. That is not what we want. If we left it this way, when someone goes to peel this sticker or decal off the sheep, It's more likely to tear. It's also going to have big holes where you see all of these pieces inside. Massive holes are going to be cut out of this, of this decal, and that's really not what we want. So let's clean up this cut File. We're going to select just the outer outline and then choose Edit Points option. And first let's start cleaning up the center. So we're just going to delete all of that. Remove all of these points, and tell the Silhouette Cameo. We do not want it Cutting inside the center of our decal. Okay, So that looks good. Now, the center of this sticker will no longer have cut marks. It will just be this outer red line that you can see going around the sticker. And it actually looks pretty good for the most part. But there's still some areas in here where we're probably not going to have a nice ideal cut. It's just a little too close. And we definitely want to come in and investigate these cut marks just a little bit more to see what's really going on there. I'm going to zoom in a bit more so that we can see this a little bit better. So starting here on the left, you can see there's a couple of points that are really close together. It's important that we don't have anchor points together that close because what's going to happen is Silhouette is going to come through and with the cutter, it's going to try to cut this. It's going to try to cut the next one. And for all we know, there might actually be another one inside there that we can't see on the screen. And it's going to make a whole same width right over here. It's going to look really shabby and the edges aren't gonna be as smooth. And it will just look very unprofessional and untidy. That's not what we want. We want our cuts to look really good, really smooth, and very professional. So what we're going to do is just delete some of those and look at that. There was another one hiding underneath. So that's why it's important that we take the time to look and see what's really happening with with our files. I can see it's happening over here too. So we're going to delete that and then smooth it. Sometimes a smooth button works terribly, and other times it works great. The wonderful thing is that you can always control Z something. If ever something goes wrong, you can always just go up to Edit and choose undo for whatever mistake happened. Just get rid of all these points. There's so many of them that we just don't need. One, it's going to slow down our cutter. So this decal is going to take forever to Cut. We're gonna just where our blades out. We're going to wear our Cutting Mat out. And that all cost money. So it's important that we do it right, so that we don't have to worry about things like that. Okay. So now down in here we've got a couple of things going on. She's move this up a bit. You can see there's several points in there. There's also this little gap. And that's not cool. That's gonna be really ugly when someone goes to peel that off. So we'll just close that up. And I think I might just pull it up as well. We've got another anchor point hiding in there. So it's a good thing we did that. Try it again. There we go. Then you can see here there's like three or four anchor points all in one spot, not what we want. So we're going to just clean that up. Now here, it's actually read the space in-between these lines as an indentation. So again, it's always important to take a look at what Silhouette Studio has interpreted for your file and make sure that it's doing what you want it to do. We just have a little bit more to clean up and then this file will be ready to send to the cutter. Okay, So this is looking really good. We've cleaned up pretty much all the anchor points. But you can see there's something that has been overlooked right in the center of the world. So let's get rid of that. We definitely don't want a giant cut out in the middle of this globe. All right? Now this is ready to go to the cutter and we'll have a really nice decal when it's done. 12. Advanced Lesson 5: So now we're gonna move into Scenario three. What happens if your image has items that are too far apart when you're trying to create your cut File. When you go to create your outline, Silhouette, wall create to cut files, even though you've grouped the image together, you did your control G, You did it. All right, but Silhouette still is interpreting it as two separate pieces. And because of that, it's created an outline for both pieces. So that's what's happened here. Got our cool little keep calm surf on decal. And everything in here is connected. But the word on is not connected at all. It's just those one-off piece. So if we sent this through the cutter, you'd end up with two separate pieces. And that is not what we want at all. So we're going to explain how to fix that. And we'll start with grabbing the piece. That's the largest. Anytime you run into a scenario like this, it's important to work with the piece that has the most anchor points on it, that's the largest. And as we go through this process, you'll see why. So first we're going to just clean some of this app. There's some whitespace in-between some letters. Now what we want, and that's what we learned in the last lessons. So a little bit of a review. Quickly clean this stuff up. Now it looks like I just destroyed this, but don't worry, it's not my first time doing this. We definitely don't want the cut are going all the way in here and cutting out the word com. That would be a disaster for anyone who tried to pull this decal off the sheet. So what we wanted to do was start cleaning all of that interior cuts, cleaning them all out. You could keep more anchor points here if you like the letters sculpted a little bit more. We have lots of sticker sheets that do that to where it's a little more sculpted than what I'm showing here. But for the sake of this video and just for the sake of your time, I'm not gonna go through all of that stuff because by now you'll know what you're supposed to do and you can just mess with it on your own files. It's important in this process to do this part of the cleanup first before we try to grab this and bring it in. Because we're actually going to use some of these points and bring them over to incorporate this word. And it's important to know what points we want to keep and what points we want to get rid of. And we need to do that with this image first before we start incorporating this image. Okay, so now that our anchor points are cleaned up, what we're going to do is start incorporating this word over here. So we want to actually leave this little trace file on the word on because we're going to use it as a reference. And then when we're all done, we can just delete that. So grab the outline. We're going to go back and choose our edit points. And this time instead of deleting, which we've done a lot of so far, we're going to just drag some of these over and we're going to use them. And the reason why we want to keep the outline is because it's going to help make sure that we retain that. The 0.0 600, which is what we set this to. It's going to retain that because we've got a reference so that way we won't end up bringing our cut mark to close to the actual image on the sticker. You can make sure that that is retained. It doesn't have to be perfect because again, if this was a piece that we wanted cut, we would come in and clean up all these lines anyways to keep them smooth and reduce the number of anchor points. So it doesn't have to be exactly perfect just to give us an idea of where our lines should line up. Okay, So that looks good. Now we're going to do is delete this outline. Now the word on will be connected with the rest of this image. Now on Understandably these lines are a little rough. I could take the time and start tweaking them and add anchor points and make them a lot cooler. But just for the sake of this video, I wanted to show the principles of how to incorporate pieces that get separated. Just so that you can do this on your own things 13. Advanced Lesson 6: Thank you so much for taking this advanced Cutting course. I hope this course helped get you to a point where you can go in and clean up an existing cut File or make new Cut Files more efficiently, saving you time and money and wear and tear on your cutting machine and materials. Now when you run into cut File obstacles, you'll be better prepared to tackle them successfully and be able to create the most beautiful cut shapes for your artwork. If you have any questions while going through this course, feel free to contact me. Happy crafting everyone 14. Bonus Lesson 1: Hi. My name is Tanya. I'm a professional illustrator with over 20 years experience. My husband and I run a successful online sticker company. And in this video, I'll teach you the tricks of the trade to create your very own sticker sheet art files in Adobe Illustrator. By using the skills taught in this course, you will be able to create sticker sheet art files that are ready to upload into silhouette studio, allowing you to create your own beautiful, high quality sticker sheets. This class assumes you have a basic working knowledge of Adobe illustrator. In particular, the layers panel, shape tools, a line panel, and the text tool. In this class, we'll walk through how to create all of the components a quality sticker sheet should have, such as registration marks, image layout, exterior sheet borders, and build the necessary cut mark spacing boxes to help ensure you get perfect cuts every time you bring your sticker file into silhouette studio. We'll also cover working with both vector and raster files in the world of stickers. So you'll be trained and ready to start creating sticker sheets no matter what type of image you're working with. If you're looking for a class to teach you the process of how to create cut files in Silhoutte studio, which would be the next step in sticker sheet creation, check out my next level course, creating stickers, using Silhouette Studio, right here in Skillshare. So if you're ready to jump into the awesome world of sticker creation, using Adobe Illustrator, join me in class, and let's have some fun. 15. Bonus Lesson 2: To begin, we need to create the registration marks. These are the symbols that Silhutte Studio and your silhouette cutting machine will register when the machine reads your printed sticker sheet. They determine the success or failure of every cut you make, so it's important to get that right. When we create sticker sheets in our studio, we use an 8.5 by 11 sheet of sticker paper, and so that is the size of the document I have opened here on screen. We use a 0.400 of an inch inset for the top, bottom, left and right of the page. Your inset number is what you'll input into Silhouette studio when you're creating your cut files. That number tells Silhouette studio what your maximum border is and where to look for your registration marks on the printed page so that it can line up your cut marks with your sticker art. We found that the 0.400 inset number is perfect for giving us lots of options to maximize the use of each piece of sticker paper we run through the cutter. When creating your registration marks, it's important to put them on their own layer and lock it. This helps ensure that no matter what you do while working with the file, you won't accidentally move the marks. To create the registration marks, you'll need a square and two L shaped lines. You can see I have them here in this example. First, we want to create the square. To do that, we're going to go to the shape tool. Choose the square, and then we want our box to be 0.21 " by 0.21 ". So a perfect square. Click Okay. And we want to leave the fill color as black. Next, we want to create these lines. So these are actually two individual lines to zoom in here, so you can see it. So we've got one line here and one line here. You can just draw those by simply using the line segment tool. And you want to make sure that each line is 0.7 639 of an inch long. And then you want to set your stroke to one point and keep the line also in the color black. Once you have your two lines drawn, then you want to connect them the way you see them here in this example. And then group them simply by grabbing both of them and hitting Control G on your keyboard to group, and then duplicate this so that you have two sets of these lines. Going to clear our artboard here. Now that you have your symbols, you'll need to draw an alignment box so that you'll know where to place your newly created symbols on the page. I have one pre drawn here. You can create this box the same way you made the earlier box just by clicking on the rectangle tool, and you want to create a box that is 0.400 of an inch square. You can make it whatever color you want, doesn't really matter because this is just for your reference. Now we want to take that newly created alignment box and put it on the top left corner. In the Zooms you can see it a little bit better. You want to line it up so that it touches the edge of your page. Then you're going to take your black square and you're going to place it as you see it on the screen here so that vertically, it sits right where this alignment box is touching. You want them to just barely touch. Once you've done that, then take your alignment box and now move it to the left side of the page and do the same thing. You can see I've already aligned this square. I've done this so that it's easier for you to follow the steps to make sure that you're getting your stuff in the right place. Once that's complete, now we want to do the same thing with the L shapes. We're going to zoom out, and we're going to take our square and set it at the top of the page. We want to take our little box and line it up just like we did with the registration box. So you're going to put it at the top. You're also going to put it on the right, and you can just use it to line up your L shapes. Once that's done, then you want to go down to the bottom left and do the same thing. We're going to put that there, and then you would take your L shape and just line it up with the box. And then also place it here and make sure that that lines up. So we've got our registration marks complete. I'm just going to move that over here. The next thing we want to do is label this and then lock the layer. It's really important to lock the layer. That way we won't accidentally move things around or bump our registration marks. 16. Bonus Lesson 3: Now that we have our registration marks complete, we can move into the next step, which is deciding what size of sticker sheet we want to make. We can make whatever size and shape we want, really the options are endless. For this example, we're going to create what we call regular size stickers. You'll see here in my example that I have two boxes already pre drawn. To create these boxes, just simply go to the shape tool and choose the rounded rectangle tool. These tell us the size of the sticker sheet, as well as what the art will reside within. As you can see here, our art lives within those boxes. These exterior box dimensions will be important when you go to create your cup file in silhouette Studio, I need to draw them in that program. You'll not only want to create cut marks for each sticker on the sheet in silhouette studio, but also for these exterior boxes so that when you're finished cutting the stickers, you end up with two separate sticker sheets separated from that 8.5 by 11 sheet of sticker paper. Just remember to set your silhouette studio to double cut these exterior boxes and change your blade setting to something like a number four to ensure that it cuts through the paper. 17. Bonus Lesson 4: So let's move on to the next step, which is deciding what type of header we want on our sticker sheet. Because Skillshare doesn't allow us as teachers to provide information in some of our course videos about our own businesses, I had to create a fake sticker sheet header to teach this concept. But I kept the style, layout, et cetera, the same as what we use, so you can get a better idea of what to do. So why is it important to have a sticker sheet header? Well, if you're creating these for personal use, then a header is not really that important. But if you plan on selling sticker sheets, then your header is very important. It not only makes your sticker sheet look professional, but if you put the right information on it, you can brand your product and provide social media and website information. So your customers know where to get more sticker sheets, and by creating a style number for each sticker sheet. It allows your customers to reorder them whenever they run out, and it can also save you a lot of time trying to find certain files that have that style number related to it. As far as the design of your sticker sheet, header options are endless. Size will be a concern because you don't want to interfere with the number of stickers you can get on the sheet. So it's best to keep it fairly small. I also recommend you don't do a solid color band across any one side of the sheet. It may look cool, but this will likely increase your ink costs per sticker sheet. You can see in my example that our header just has the necessary information. Company name, social media tag, where to shop, and the style number. And because we're designing a page that will ultimately create two separate sticker sheets, I've duplicated it down below, using our exterior box as a reference for placement. 18. Bonus Lesson 5: It's always fun when we get to work with artwork. So let's begin by using a design that I created here in Illustrator. This is just a fun vector drawing of a Zoom meeting. We can just place it wherever we think that it should probably go on the sheet using our exterior boxes as a guide. But if you want things to be uniform and professional, it's always a good idea to have measuring tools. To help, we use a size box, which I have on its own separate layer. Now, this little cut size box is only 0.1 821 inches square. This helps us to see how much space is needed between each of the stickers. When we cut in silhouette studio, we create our cut files with a 0.040 offset. By having this little square B measurement tool in Adobe Illustrator, it tells us if a sticker is too close to another sticker and if it will need to be moved. That means we don't have to trial and error every single sticker sheet cut file. We know what the result will be with the cut before we make the cut. This saves us a ton of time and materials in testing. So let's start lining up where we think the stickers should go and use our cut size box to help along the way. I simply duplicating the sticker at this point. You can either do that holding down the Alt key and left click and drag, or you can just simply do a copy and paste, which is control P, Control C, and Control V. If we take our cut size box, we can see where we need to provide more space between our stickers. You can see that it fits, but just barely. It's not a comfortable fit. So we definitely need to move this sticker over. And something that we've always liked doing in our studio is using the align tool. So you can see the stickers a little further down. The spacing between the stickers is not even. So if you just go up here to the align panel, if yours is not showing, you can get to it by going to window and choose a line. And then what you want to do is top align it, so vertical align to top. I'm going to click that and then horizontal distribute Center. And that's just going to evenly distribute the stickers across the page. That looks much more professional. So we're going to select them all, group them, which is simply control G, and then copy and paste these below. That way, we can fill out our sticker sheet. And then I'm going to grab all three, and we're going to distribute vertical distribute center from our line panel. There we go. That looks a lot more professional. Now, it looks like there's enough spacing in between each sticker, but it's always good to just take our little box and just run it through and just make sure that there's lots of breathing room in between each sticker. That way, when the cutter comes through and cuts around the sticker, it's not going to end up overlapping with another sticker. We're going to set that aside. And then we're creating two sticker sheets. So now what we want to do is take the same artwork that we made here and duplicate it down below. Okay, so we've completed our sticker sheet using vector art. But now what we want to do is learn how to create stickers using Raster art. Some of the techniques are the same as what you just learned, but there's a few things that are different that I want to share with you, as well as some tricks that we've learned that will save you a lot of time and hassle using Raster art. You can see in this example, I have some artwork that I drew in photoshop that has been saved as a his ping file. I've set this file up on purpose to show you an example of how you sometimes get clip art from artists so that if this happens to you, you'll know what to do so that you can still make stickers out of it. Some artists get lazy and don't crop out all this extra space from their artboard before saving the file for you to purchase and use. You see all this extra space. This is not good when you're trying to work with it because illustrator registers it as part of the image itself. That makes it really hard to work with and impossible to use your line tools with, which are essential for making professional looking quality sticker sheets. So if this is what the clip art you purchase looks like. No worry. You just have a little extra work ahead of you, and I'm going to walk you through how to fix that. First, you want to make sure you have the image selected, at the very top, you'll see a button that says crop image. Select that button, and then use the bounding box parameters to adjust the edges. And we're just going to bring this in as close to the artwork as we can get without cutting it off. Okay. That looks pretty good. So now that we've done that, we can either click apply or simply hit the enter key. Now it's a much more reasonable size to work with. This is great. Because this is a high rise pain, that means that when I go to duplicate this image ten or more times, the file size of that sticker sheet file an illustrator is going to become massive, especially if I have multiple sticker sheet layers in that illustrator file. Depending on your computer, you may also hit your ram ceiling and crash illustrator. So here's a trick to help with that. Simply scale the image down to just a bit larger than the sticker size you want to create. I'm just going to scale that down and then do a file export Export make sure it's Ping. Choose port. And then under the resolution, make sure it says 300 PPI and for the background color, make sure it's transparent. And then simply click. Now open that newly saved ping and then we're just going to copy and paste that into our illustrator file. You didn't lose print quality because you kept the DPI at 300. But because you scaled the image down in size, you make it much easier for your computer to work with and not hit your ram ceiling. So we're just going to scale this down a little bit more. I think I'm going to use that meeting sticker as a reference for the height. It's nice once you have one sticker created, you can use it to help you with your other stickers. Okay. Perfect. And then I think we should add some words to this. So I'm just going to add. Snow day. Turn it to pink. That looks cute. Group that together, and then start placing our sticker down on the page. So then we'll just go through the same process that we did with our vector art, and we're just going to duplicate it. Can you bring that over. Learn a little more. And then using our line tool, we're going to do a horizontal distribute center. Than a vertical. Okay. Now, I can tell just by looking at this that these are way too close together. There's too many stickers. If you take this little size cut box here, you're going to see by zoom in that we're going to have overlapping cuts, and that's just not going to work. So just simply delete one, grab all of them again and do a horizontal distribute center and try it again. Now let's o we're going to see if it's a better fit. So it's still it's tight. You could get away with it. I probably get rid of one more just because sometimes with these tiny little edges here, you just you want to make sure that you've got breathing room. The worst thing you want to do is bring it in after you put all this work into it and have a terrible cut. So I think I'm going to delete one more. So this is perfect. I'm really glad this happened. This is a classic example why you want to lock the layers that you're not currently using. So I thought all I was grabbing were these. I ended up grabbing the exterior bounding box as well. And this is what happens. So we need to make sure that anything that we're not currently using is locked. Now when we distribute horizontally, it will work perfectly. And if we take our cut file blocks here, we can see there's plenty of room. We can make some beautiful cut marks inside of silhouette studio and have room to do it. Okay, so we're going to group all of these together and then duplicate it just like we did with the last one. And then distribute vertically. This is looking really good. Okay, so now we're creating two sticker sheets. So let's copy and paste that down here. And now we've got our two sticker sheets using raster type style art with text. Okay, so this looks really good. So now we want to prep this file to send it over to Silhouette Studio. So to do that, we're going to hide the layers that we don't want to be captured in the image. So we're going to hide our border. We're going to hide this cut size box. It won't be captured, but it just makes me feel good to know that what I see on screen is what I'm sending over. And then we're also going to hide this registration mark. So the reason why we're hiding this registration mark when we go to save this file is because when you create your sticker file inside of Silhouette Studio, when you import this file, you're actually going to recreate the registration marks using Silhouette Studio's registration panel by entering in that same 0.400 of an inch number for all four edges of the page. But when you go to print your sticker sheet, that's when you want to have your registration mark showing because you need it to print on the actual sticker paper itself. By doing that, you're going to enable Silhoutte Studio to understand the file that you just made here in Illustrator. So one other tip when you go to print, never ever print your sticker sheets from Silhoutte Studio. For the best print quality, always print directly from Illustrator. So this is looking good. We're just going to hide that registration, and we're going to go up to file, save a copy. We're going to choose Save as PDF. And that name is fine. I'll just leave it as is. Click Save. And I have a default that I like. It really doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It's just a default I've used forever since I've started with Illustrator, and it just has all of these options unchecked and acrobat set to eight. Just a personal preference. I know it does compress the file size just a little bit and makes it easier to work with the files. But you can save it however you please. So then just click Save PDF. And then it's important to go back to your illustrator file, turn your registration mark back on and choose file, save. And the reason why is because you'll go to print and forget that you turned off your registration mark when you saved it for your silhouette file. And then now you've printed it without your registration mark. And that's the whole point of bringing it into silhouette is to have your registration marks so that it can read your illustration files. So if that ever happens, if you ever print and you have a printed sheet and it looks like this, and you're freaking out because you have no registration marks and you've just wasted a sheet of paper, don't worry, pop it back in the printer, turn off all of your layers except for your registration layer and just run it through the printer again and it will put your registration marks where it needs to be on the page. And that way, when it's done, the page will come back to being what you need it to be with all of your art and your registration marks. 19. Bonus Lesson 6: Thank you so much for taking this sticker sheet creation class in Adobe Illustrator. I hope this course helped you get up and running with creating your own sticker sheets so you can use them in Silhuette Studio. If you're not sure how to move forward with the next step, which is creating cut files for your sticker sheet in Silhouette Studio, be sure to check out my other course, creating stickers using Silhouette Studio, right here in Skillshare. If you have any questions while going through this or any of my courses, feel free to contact me.