Digitize Your Artwork & Lettering & Create Custom Planner Accessories with Silhouette +FREE STICKERS

1. Class Overview: everybody, Welcome back to my skill share channel. I'm so excited that you're here. My name is Anna Baker, and I'm a hand lettering and calligraphy artist with a passion for teaching. In this class, I'll be showing you how to combine your personal artwork and hand lettering together with the power of Silhouette studio, which comes free with your machine to create your own personal custom planner accessories. I'll walk you step by step through the process of getting to know your machine and your software so that you can customize and create anything that you want. As of anything, the best way to learn is to practice and will be doing that by making a bunch of awesome planner. Accessories will be making covers customized with your own personal artwork dividers, inserts that you can write on and erase over and over again to stickers that you can use to decorate or memory plan. The best thing about having a machine like a silhouette is Theobald ality to make anything that you want and make it fully customized. This is a great class to watch if you're interested or curious about the silhouette machines and what they can do, or if you're a beginner and haven't taken advantage of the awesome, customizable capabilities that your machine is offering you. So take that machine out of the box, download your software and follow along in class, and let's get to know your software and machine by making really fun, customized planter accessories that have your stamp on them. 2. Supplies: Okay, let's talk basic supplies. First of all, you're going to need the software silhouettes Studio is free on solu America dot com's website, and the free version does pretty much everything that you needed to do. Unless you are a business owner and want upgrade, simply go to their website, click on the software button and then click on the appropriate version of the software, depending on what computer you have, whether that be a Mac or a PC, I am using a Cameo three, but you can do this with any of the cameos or portrait's. I'll also be using my iPad Pro, a large happy planner, a cutting mat for my silhouette machine in a 12 by 12 paper and things to cut like sticker paper, paper card stock, any of those things. You also see me. Use some extras or fun supplies that don't come with your machine. Some things I'll be using our markers, the foil quill and he activated foil the pen holder tool and watercolors and watercolor paper. Also be using a laminate er to get that multi purpose, dry erase effect from some of my inserts and those air most of the materials that you'll see throughout the class. So let's jump into class 3. Get To Know Your Machine: Okay, so let's take a quick two minutes to go over the elements and parts of your machine. I will be using a Cameo three, but most of these parts you'll see in the different cameos as well as the portrait machines , just maybe in different places. The first thing you'll see is a touch screen on the right hand side, and this is where you'll see your basic functions like load unload, movement, arrows and so on. This little lever adjusts the height of your roller bar, and this is especially helpful if you're going to be putting in other materials like a vinyl. There's also these little lock rollers that allow you to change the size based on the size of cutting Matt you're using or other material on the left hand side. The Cameo three has a little bit of a storage container, which is convenient, and the Cameo three has what's called a dual carriage system, and this is really convenient because it allows you to do to actions at the same time. I always have my cutting blade in the first carriage holder, and I'll use the 2nd 1 for my sketchy another really nice feature of the cameo three is this hidden drawer that allows you to create a little bit more space toe. Hold up your cutting mat and to store some of your extra tools like you're reading tools, your spatulas and your cutter. You want to make sure that any time you're loading in materials to your cameo or portrait machines that you're making sure you're lining it up next to those arrows and blue lines, especially the one on the left. Based on the size of your material or cutting Matt, you will adjust the roller on the right hand side to change the depth of your cutting blade . Simply unlock the carriage holder and use the little notch turning tool right into your machine. Make sure that that little arrow is facing the red line and bend. Just turn and click until you get to the appropriately depth number. Put it back in your carriage holder and lock in place. Now that you're familiar with your machine, let's get familiar with your software 4. Get To Know Silhouette Studio: I'm going to give you a very quick and basic overview of silhouette studio just so that you have a understanding of where things are at before we jump in. Silhouette Studio allows you to access your tools and menus from a variety of places, and most of them are right on the screen. As you're working at the top, you'll see a lot of basic functions. Exume and undo. On the left hand side, you'll see more basic tools that allow you to edit the work that you're doing. And on the right hand side, you'll see all of your major menu panels. The space in the middle is your design work space, where you'll actually see everything that you're doing. And this is what will go to the machine. On the left hand side, you have your select and move to a was just looks like an arrow, and that's a really great keyboard function. Toe learn is just the letter V so you can click on that as you're working and you can quickly go between selecting and you're editing tools. Then you see the line drawing tools, and this allows you to draw curves and lines so that you can create shapes or divide things . It's up to you. You'll see me use this as well throughout the class. Sometimes it's also necessary to actually edit or add your points or things that make up your shapes. And that's access by the point editor. You simply click on that or double click on your shape, and then you can deal with the actual points themselves. Delete them at hm. This is where you would access that. But if you're looking for more basic shapes, you can use this shape drawing tool if you access that you condone, draw different rectangles, rounded rectangles, circles, ellipses, all of that kind of thing. And if you hold down the shift key, it'll make perfect shape so you can see here. I'm just holding down the shift key, and it automatically snaps it to a perfect square. This also works with a circle shape. As you're drawing your circle, just hold on your shift key and you'll see that it will snap to a perfect circle. Another really handy tool is the knife tool, and this is literally what it says. It cuts through things, so if you want to cut through a shape to create a new shape. You can just simply click and drag that through your shapes, and it'll split those lines from each other again. Holding down the shift key will allow you to keep a perfectly straight line, and you'll see me use that again throughout the class to divide things and create new ones . Now over on the right hand side, Israel access all of your big menus, so at the top you'll see page settings, and this is where you can set up. Your registration marks her dimensions. Whether you're using a cutting mat, all of those things are accessed in those page settings. It's really important to set these up before you start working, just that you have everything in the right place and you don't have to do extra work because you thought you had space that you didn't. The pick scan settings are also on the right hand side, but we'll have a in depth tutorial on all things picks can in a future lessen. The next one is the color fill panel, and this is exactly what it sounds like. It allows you to add colors, patterns and textures to the filling of the things that you're creating. The same can go for line styles. This allows you to choose the lion color to choose whether you want to dash their dotted line, rounded corners and so on. Not only does this affect the look of your lines, it affects the way your machine cuts those lines. So if you want to create something perforated so that you can fold it more easily, choose a dashed line, and that will give you that perforated style without having to cut through the material all the way through. The next one is the trace panel, and this is the one that I personally use the most because I like to create my own artwork . This allows you to literally trace over whatever you have in your design area and create cut lines around those things that it can also detach them from your work so that you can use them in different places. So, for example, if you're creating stickers like we will in the future, you can create your own artwork, detach it from your photos and use it in a mirror yet of possibilities. Image effects is a fun one. If you like to memory plan and add special effects to your photos. Textiles allows you to actually change the font styles of your text and, you know, choose things like current ing. Whether you want it to be bold, your spacing. All of those things are in your text panel. So if you want to add text to your project, used the text tool on the left hand side type. Hear words, then use your text panel on the right hand side to change the font. And the way that the actual letters look. Next is the transform panel, and this allows you to really determine the location of your design elements the size, the rotation, all of those kinds of things. So, for example, if you want a center something, you can do that easily from the transform panel. Next, you have the replicate panel, and I use a lot of keyboard shortcuts. But this is a great visual so that you can see what you're replicating, and this allows you to replicate your artwork. So, for example, if you're creating a bunch of boxes, you can do that quickly with the replicate panel. You can also use the modify panel to create new things. So, for example, here I'm taking two of those shapes, and I'm merging them together to create a new one. Another really helpful tool is Theo Offset panel, and this allows you to create cut lines around objects or even inside of other cut lines. So if you want to create great aided shapes or you want to have a nice white border around a sticker or some die cut ephemera, this is a great way to do that. Another really cool function that a lot of people will really enjoy is thes sketch option, and this allows you to actually draw your designs with your machine instead of just cutting them so you could use your own markers. You can use your own pens with the pen holder tool to draw your designs on a variety of surfaces. So, for example, this is great for bulk crafting because it allows you to draw your design one time and then have the machine apply that design on a variety of projects. So, like I always like to say, the best way to get to know all of this stuff is to actually practice it. So let's jump into class and use these tools to make awesome projects together 5. What Artwork Types Can I Use?: While digital art is certainly a very easy way to incorporate the silhouette machine and artwork together, it's certainly not the only kind of art that you can use. For example, throughout the class, you will see me creating watercolor art directly on the paper with paints, as well as scanning art to get high resolution photos and digital art. The majority of the class will be using digital art, but I wanted to show you that the possibilities here are really limited to only the types of materials that you have on hand and your personal imagination. So if you do want to create artwork that you're going to cut out of a particular material, go ahead and use the pick skin cutting mat with a photo and watch that tutorial on how to do it. If you want to create artwork in a particular medium on a particular type of material, and yet you want to digitize that to use digitally and create a number of different projects with it, scanning as a great way to get that artwork into your software. If you do choose to scan, follow the instructions of your particular scanner and dragon drop that photo into your software. At this point, you can trace it and remove the excess material or the white background from your artwork so that you get a nice, transparent image to use in different ways. This allows you to get that digitized feeling of your artwork without having to invest in something like an iPad pro and apple pencil. Or if you simply just prefer to create your artwork in a tactile hands on medium. This is a great way to do that and still get the benefits of using your artwork digitally. Keep in mind that this is not Photoshopped, so you won't get the high level of preciseness that you might get with that kind of program . However, this works really well for basic, clean artwork, and it's a great alternative to spending a lot of money on a program like Photoshopped. Now this feature here, where I'm tracing by color, is an option that's only available with upgraded versions of Silhouette studio. However, the upgraded versions of Silhouette Studio are still much more affordable than buying photo shop. The main thing to keep in mind when digitizing traditional artwork in Silhouette studio is to try and keep it a bit simple. And to use the trace and detach feature because this takes that artwork out of your background and allows you to use it in a bunch of different ways In this class, the artwork that you'll see me working with the most is digital art that I created on my iPad pro with the apple pencil and an app called procreate. This is a really great intuitive drawing app that allows you to create a lot of realistic looking artwork, and it also makes it super easy to get transparent images into your software to then trace and use organically in a number of different ways. So I am just drawing some artwork in procreate, using the layers system and creating large sheets, basically with all different kinds of artwork that I can then digitize and take out and use in a different in a bunch of different ways. And it's really simple to get your artwork into your software. This way I have Apple products, so I'm going to be using the airdrop feature, and I'm a simply air dropping my artwork to my computer and then I'll drag and drop my artwork into Silhouettes studio. Then the process is the same where I'll trace it, detach it and use it in a bunch of different ways, all of which we will get into specific details in the lessons. So go ahead and grab your own artwork or one of the files I've provided for your personal use and follow along in class. 6. Easy & Simple Decorative Clip: I really fun and easy way to get comfortable with your silhouette. Software and machine is to make a clip for your planner. This is really convenient because it allows you to keep tabs on what week you're in and easily flip to that place in your planner. So we're going to start by dragging and dropping our transparent PNG photo into the software. And this is done on the iPad pro with the apple pencil. And once I have dragged that into my software, I'm going to choose the trace feature, which looks like a little butterfly. I'm gonna hit select trace area and click and drag over the entire area of my artwork. I'm going to be using this artwork throughout the class so you'll see this a couple times, click, trace and detach so that you can use those images individually and move them around. Once you've done that, you can click and drag on the excess part of your photo and just hit delete. And now each one of your elements from your artwork is now individually available for you to manipulate and make a bunch of different things with. So the first thing I'm gonna do Just to keep things really simple is to select all of my artwork by clicking and dragging going to the Senate panel. And as you can see, I have read cut lines around all of these pieces. I don't want those cut lines in place. Someone hit No cut. This now allows me to manipulate the cut lines to be the way I want them to be and get me the best results all of the time. Next, I'm gonna go to the offset panel which looks like a star within a star. And you can do this all at once or individually. I just clicked and dragged to select all of them and I hit Offset. Once you decide how large oven offset you like you can hit, apply. And now I have cut lines that create a nice little border around each of my pieces of art. I can click and delete any extra pieces that got picked up by the software that I don't need. And now I'm ready to create my clip. So I'm gonna open a new document and because this is something I am printing and then cutting, I need registration marks. So I'm gonna click the registration mark panel and I'm going to choose the regular cameo or portrait addition. And make sure that your page is that to 8.5 by 11 or whatever your printer prints. You can also adjust those registration marks to be further out in smaller so you can maximize Thea amount of paper you have. So I'm going to simply copy and paste my artwork from my previous document into the new document. And then I'm going to duplicate it so that I have a friend and back to this clip. You can do that easily by hitting the command button and then a directional arrow, or you could go into object and replicate. Now I'm going to move that extra image off to the side because all I need is the cut line. I'm not gonna have to a double sided clip this time, and I now have those cut lines, so I have two pieces of paper that will match perfectly. You can flip thes or mirror them vertically or horizontally. This is especially helpful if you're cutting it out of patterned paper, and you want that paper to match once you have printed it. Put it on your cutting mat and send it to your machine. I am printing this on regular card stock, and the settings for card stock worked perfectly. It's really helpful to use these little spatula tools to get something small and flexible, like card stock off of that sticky Matt. So now you can see that we have two pieces for our clip. So I'm gonna grab my oversized jumbo clip, and I'm just gonna eyeball it here and decide exactly how I want this clip to come together . Now, I would recommend that you use some type of permanent adhesive for creating these clips. However, I just wanted to show you the process for the purposes of this class. And this actually works just fine for me because I keep my planter in one place on my desk . So I'm using these glue dots, and I just put them in various places throughout the paper. And before I adhered them together, I stuck my paper clip into the little pouch created by putting these two pieces of paper together. And then I continued to adhere them together with that glue. And the results are fabulous. It's such a fun and easy way to add some extra personal touch to your planner while also being very functional and helping you find your place quickly. 7. Custom Inserts-Menu Dashboard: one of the awesome things about Silhouette studio is the power and capability to create things that are completely your own from scratch without having to buy any pre made designs . Today, I'm gonna show you how I do that by creating a custom insert for my planter. And in this case, I'll be making a menu planning dashboard. I'll be using my own artwork that I've created in procreate with the Apple pencil, and I'll be using the basic features of Silhouette Studio to create a completely unique dashboard for my planner. So I'm going to start this project like I do all the others and making sure my dimensions air right. And I'm going to drag and drop my personal artwork into the program because we'll be printing this. You need to make sure that you turn on your registration marks and choose the option that fits your particular machine. So I've written out the days of the week, and I have also created a color palette to make it really easy to get the colors that I want into my project really quickly. So once you've opened your trace panel, click and drag to select all of the artwork that you want to trace, and here you can bump up the threshold to get full coverage, which is what I usually do. One thing I will be doing differently, though, is hitting the trace and detach button because I want to use these images exactly the way they are now. If you want to be able to re color them, you will just hit the trace button and I'll show you a little bit later exactly how I do that. So I'm going to click and drag the background of that photo the leftovers and move it off to the side, select it and delete it. And now I'm left with the individual elements of my design. Now they are completely individual pieces, So I'm going to click and drag to select all of the elements of one particular design hit object and then group. Or, if you use your keyboard command, you can hit command G and that will group your objects together to make it easier to move around. I'm also going to group together my color palette and move it off to my left hand side to make it really easy to access later on. If you do want to re color any of your artwork, all you have to do is sit the trace panel, click and drag to select it, bump up the threshold if necessary and then hit trace. And that will give you those empty cut lines that you can now fill with your preferred color. You could also choose a pattern that they have here orig radiant. I'm just going to choose a color so that you can see the reason I've created this color palette is to make it really easy to pick my personal taste or my personal colors easily. So I'm going to grab that eyedropper tool and click over the particular color I want within that color palette, and you can see just how quick and easy it is to pick those colors over and over again. And this makes it really easy to get a cohesive look. I'm also going to change the line color just so that I don't have those red lines over everything and distracting me the entire time. The good thing is that the last color you have chosen or used will be right next to your eyedropper tool, so It makes it really quick if you are doing your fill and lines colors altogether at the same time. So I'm just going to click and drag to select all of my images and move them off to the side for easy access. But to give me a lot of room to design my actual dashboard, I'm going to be creating a rectangle that I just grabbed from my shape panel off to the left, and you can put in your particular dimensions under the transform panel. And then I believe it's under scale. That diagonal line allows you to input specific dimensions in your width and height. Also, one thing I really like is that if you click that little lock, it keeps things in perspective, so you can just change one of the measurements and it'll keep things, um, in the particular dimensions. Or in other words, it will distort the shape that you have already created. So once I have things in the right dimensions, I am just going to be using this particular rectangle as a guide for all the other little boxes I'm going to create. Once I have my guide in place, I'm going to go back to the Shapes panel and grab that rectangle tool again. Click and drag to draw your rectangle, and then I'll go in again into the dimensions area and type in specific dimensions that I want. For these particular boxes, I will be making them 4.5 inches wide by one inch hot, and now it's time for the fun part, which is adding the color. So I'm going to go back to that fill panel, grab the eyedropper tool and choose a color from the color palette I have on my left hand side again. You can see just how easy it is to go back and forth, grabbing that eyedropper tool and keep things cohesive and within the color palette I've already determined. Then I'll go into the line color panel and choose the same color, which should be that last color used to make the line color match. So I'm gonna be building my dashboard by building these boxes and then adding my lettering artwork over the top of it so you can see that because we dealt with that artwork first. We need to bring that up to the front so you just hit, object, arrange and bring to front. You could do this all at once, which I'll show you in just a second. And then I'm gonna be re sizing my lettering artwork to fit within those boxes. One thing to keep in mind is that any time you re sizing artwork in Silhouette studio, if you want to be doing it from those corner handles to keep things from becoming distorted , then you can just click and drag, disliked both items and hit those a centering a line center buttons in your transform panel to easily center them with each other. Now one of my favorite keyboard shortcuts is the duplicate option, and that is simply done by hitting command and then a directional arrow for the direction that you want to duplicate that object. So I'm going to select my box hit command Arrow down, and I can just keep doing that until I have filled up my guide and I have the appropriate number of boxes. Obviously, since I'm doing the menu for the days of the week, I need at least seven days plus my banner for what's on the menu, so eight boxes total once I have duplicated them all. It's really easy to go in and quickly change the color by simply selecting the box, heading the eyedropper tool and grabbing the color that I want from my color palette. And this is really quick and easy and a lot of fun to kind of put those puzzle pieces together to get it looking the way I want, because I don't want to be changing the colors of my lettering. I want to keep these colors relatively light so that that dark blue of my lettering stands out because I like to pay attention to details. I'm also going to make sure that I go into the line color panel and make those line colors match the boxes. You'll find that your workflow goes a lot smoother and quicker if you learn how to multi task. And one of the best ways to do that is the multi selection option, and all you do again is click and drag disliked multiple pieces of artwork or text or whatever it is that you're working with and then give them all the same treatment at the same time. So again, all I'm doing is clicking and dragging to select all of those days of the week hitting object, arrange and bring to front. And then I can resize them and layer them on top of my boxes to build my weekly menu dashboard. Once I've gotten everything built the way I want it, I'm going to get rid of that rectangle that I use is a guide so that I don't have an extra cut line that I don't need. All I'm doing is clicking it, dragging it out of the way, and then you can leave it there to use for future reference or delete it if you don't think you'll need it anymore. And now it's time to create the cut lines for the actual tab part that will fit into the planner. I'm simply going to grab the file that I've created already for those dividers, and I'm gonna copy and paste that into my menu dashboard area. So just hit command. See, click over to your menu dashboard or whatever it is you're working on and hit command V to paste that into your document. And I'm just gonna line that up to make the most sense with a dashboard that I'm creating here now because this is an insert that's intended to go inside my planner. I need to actually make this smaller, and I'm going to do that by using the knife tool on the left hand side of our work area. And I'm simply going to cut across those cut lines, and I'm going to make sure that I have a straight line by holding down the shift key while I click and drag and I cut across that horizontal area and then I'll do the same thing on the upper portion of that cut line. And now I have these individual elements that have been detached from those important notches that I've already created. But we do need to make them go all the way around our dashboard. So I'm gonna go over to my line panel on the left hand side and draw awesome lines to connect those cut lines that we already have. So again, I was simply going to click and hold down the shift key to make sure that my line is perfectly straight. I'll drag out as far as I need to, and then Ali will let it go and create another cut line that will come down vertically to fill or to complete that rectangle shape. I'm going to try to get those lines as close as possible to my original cut lines for the tab dividers. Again, an important thing to know is to hold down your shift key to get perfectly straight lines. It holds it in place and locks it in so that you're not creating wobbly lines. Take your time, making sure that your lines are meeting up and matching up together as perfectly as you can . You can do this by clicking and dragging those little squares to make them longer or shorter or by using your directional arrows to move them precisely and accurately. Once I've drawn those lines, I'm going to hold down the shift or command button and click on all three lines to select them all together, then hit objects and make compound path. This will now make it one element that the machine can read as one long cut line. Then I decided that it would be nice to have a little bit of a border around my dashboard, so I just simply made it a little bit wider by clicking and dragging on that midpoint square. At this point, I've realized that I need to make sure that my cut lines and my printing will all fall within those registration marks. We don't want anything to fall into those gray lines because then the machine can't get to them when it's cutting them later on. Once we've got everything in place, it's time to create our cut settings. So I'm gonna go into the send panel at the top right hand corner, going to choose my material, which will be sticker paper clear, because I'm going to be laminating this and I find that this is a good base, um, to create those cut lines. Now you'll see that everything we've created has cut lines around it, because that's just the way that Sylhet works. So because I have already grouped together all of the elements of my dashboard separate from the cut lines of the tabs, I can simply click on that and then hit no cut. And once it is faded, I know that my machine won't cut them. So now it's time to print it laminated and then take it to our machine. So I'm simply using this really basic laminating machine with laminating pouches at the highest heat setting that I can get. And you can see that I've got a really nice, sturdy dashboard here. Now, one thing to know is that when you have a shiny material, the machine can sometimes have difficulty reading those registration marks. So a little trick I've come up with is to print just the registration marks on basic printer paper. Cut those registration marks out and use an adhesive tow. Line them up as perfectly as possible on your project. And you can see here that I got really close. Um, and it worked out really well. So once those air adhered, you can attach it to your cutting mat. Make sure that everything is lined up and looking the way it does or in your software loaded into your machine and hit Send from your software. The machine should read the registration marks and cut it accordingly. You can see here that the machine did a really great job cutting the laminate and card stock together, and I think it turned out really nicely. I got some really clean cut lines, and you can see here that the colors worked really well with the planner. I have everything fit perfectly, and it works exactly the way a dashboard insert should work. If you did want Teoh, take advantage of the backside of the dashboard. You could absolutely layer two pieces of card stock within your laminating sheets and get a double sided dashboard. You'll see just how well the laminate works as a dry erase dashboard. I am so impressed with how well this works. It writes very well and erases perfectly, and everything turned out super well, and I'm very excited with the results. 8. Sticker Kits & Memory Planning: one of the really fun things to do with your silhouette. Cameo for your planner is to create your own custom decorative stickers. In this tutorial, I'll show you how you can take your own artwork or artwork that you already have from someone else and make those into decorative stickers and use your own photos for memory planning. First things first, Set up your document in the correct dimensions. For future success, I will be using sticker paper, which comes in 8.5 by 11 sheets. And because I am printing thes first, I need to make sure that my registration marks are on one really meet Tip. That I have learned along the way is that you can adjust just how far those registration marks come into your paper. You can adjust the length thickness, an incident of those registration marks so that you can therefore have more room. Next, I'm going to go ahead and start creating my sticker kit. First thing I'm going to do is draw a rectangle. Now, if you are using the happy planner, these boxes tend to be right around two inches wide by three inches high. So I'm just gonna go ahead and type those dimensions right into my scale panel under the transform menu. Now I have the perfect dimensions in place for my rectangles, and these will be the full box designs that I will be using. I'll be putting artwork in here, and I will also be putting photos now To duplicate this. You can do it a number of ways. The first way is to use a keyboard shortcut, which is the command and then a directional arrow to move that copied box in whichever direction you like. Or you can access it from the object menu or replicate and then choose in which direction. There's also a replicate panel on the right hand side of your menu, and therefore you can choose to replicate by columns and rose or even fill an entire page. It's a really convenient and helpful now for my particular design purposes. I know that I need four regular full boxes and one double box. So those last two, I'm just going to get rid of one of them and then stretch out the other to be four by three inches high. Once I have my great in place, I decided to go ahead and work on my artwork. So I'm dragging and dropping my transparent PNG into the software that I can then handle and deal with directly again. For your reference, I did create all of this in procreate on my iPad pro with the apple pencil. Now, to use my favorite tool, the trace feature, I'm going to click the trace panel, select trace area and then click and drag over all of my artwork in order to trace it. I'm gonna bump up that threshold pretty high until I feel that all of the artwork is covered and nice and bright yellow. And because I'm going to use these images the way that they are, I'm going to hit, trace and detach. This will then pull those images out of those files so that then I can use them as individual elements. Now, simply click on that empty space of your original photo, drag it to the side and delete it. And as you can see now, each of my pieces of artwork that I will be using to create these stickers are now individual elements with a transparent background. Now, an important thing to keep a note is to click and drag to select all of them. Go to your send menu, and as you can see, it has created cut lines very tightly around the design. I don't want thes cut lines to be there, so I'm going to choose no cut. And now you can see that all of the artwork is faded and there are no cut lines. This is extremely important if you don't want those cut lines to be there to just do it at the beginning and get it over with so that you don't have to fight with the software later on to figure out how to get rid of those cut lines. Speaking from personal experience, this is a really great way to do that. Now I can create the cut lines that I do want by hitting the offset feature. I can do all of this at the same time if I have enough space between my designs and I do in this, so I have all of them selected a hit offset, and I like the way that it looks. So I'm not gonna just the measurements at all hit apply, and now you have cut lines for each of your particular stickers. Now they are not grouped together. So you do want to make sure that you select them together and move them around as their selected to keep those cut lines in perfect alignment with your designs. One thing did keep a no. Is that you don't want to group them together because the machine will read that no cut option and won't allow the machine to cut the cut lines that you do want. So now I'm just going to start assembling my sticker kit by putting the stickers together in the way that makes the most sense to avoid wasting any of the paper. This next part is important, and you can either do it one at a time or all at the end, whichever is your preference. But you want to go back into that send option and click on that outer offset cut line that we created and choose Cut. Now, your machine will cut that offset line and create a nice little border around your artwork . Now, I'm just going to continue to assemble the sticker kit the way I would like, and I'm gonna put some of that artwork into these full boxes so that I can fill an entire space in my planner with my own personal artwork. You can use theologian options by opening your transform panel and making sure that when you select the box and your design that that artwork is aligned perfectly in the centre one more time. For quick reference, go to your son panel. Click on that outer offset cut line that we've created and choose cut. Once you see it in red, you know that machine will cut it exactly where you want. One thing I really love to do with my planner is memory planning and Silhouette. Studio makes it really easy to input photos into your designs. All you have to do is click and drag your photo hover over the box that you wanted to go in , and Silhouette Studio will automatically format it to be centered within that box. It's a really convenient and handy, and I find that it doesn't really good job, and I don't need to do anything else. I'm going to start the process over again with some artwork that I've created in a different file, and I'm gonna be doing the same process that I described in the beginning, I'll be tracing it, detaching it from the original photo and then creating those offset cut lines so that I can then use those images as stickers. I did want to show you a couple things that came up with this particular artwork to show you how to navigate those issues in the future if you so encounter them. So, for example, because some of this artwork was not attached, they are all individual pieces, so I want to group those together. I will select everything goto, object and click make compound path. This will then to make it one image that the machine reads altogether. Now, if you'll notice all of this, artwork is really close to each other. So it's not optimal for creating offset cut lines just yet because they'll all bump into each other. So what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to spread them out really quickly so that I can then create offset cut lines for them all at the same time. Once I've done that, I can click and drag to select all of them, go to my offset panel and choose offset and now there's plenty of room all between the different pieces of artwork, so that those offset cut lines are exactly where they need to be and not interfering with each other. Hit, apply and you're good to go. If you have any areas that created cut lines where you don't want them, simply double click on them and you'll see the points panel pop up on the right hand side. Just simply click on the particular little dots that you don't want and hit. Delete point, and it will get rid of them for you nice and quickly, and you'll have nice, clean cut lines. Continue these processes until you've built your sticker kit toe. Look exactly the way you want. Make sure that none of your cut lines interfere with each other so that you don't get any weird wonky stickers in the future. Make sure that you're also paying attention to spacing and avoid wasting any of that paper . Once you have everything looking the way you want it, click send and make sure that all your cut lines are turned on by again. Clicking that offset cut line and choosing cut. Now everything is ready to get set up for the machine. So simply choose your materials, which would be sticker paper for me, in this case, plane sticker paper, and then choosing the depth of blade that you like, I find that for sticker paper, you have to do some testing. My particular sticker paper usually likes a blade depth of three, as opposed toothy suggested to. So once you have printed off your document and cut it out on the machine, you can now decorate your planner. As you can see, the machine did a really great job of cutting all of these stickers for me and getting everything perfectly aligned. One of the things I really like about the happy Planner is the ability to quickly take pages out and put things in. So this makes it really easy to decorate your planner by being able to get those pages out and not have those rings interfering with your hands and the placement of your stickers. I like to start with the largest and most important things first, when I'm decorating my planner pages, so I'll start with my photos and full boxes, and then I'll start adding my decorative elements like decorative stickers, and I really like to add washi tape to those borders to again, have a cohesive color scheme and make things just look like they all belong together. Of course, this all got started with a love of lettering, so I'll be adding some direct to the page hand lettering by using a micron pen and other small brush pens. You could totally make these stickers if you know exactly what you're going to be doing. But because I didn't have a complete idea of everything I wanted in this planner page, I I decided to go ahead and keep some things for actual pen to paper. One of the things I really enjoy about creating things for my planner is being able to incorporate things that are special and meaningful to me. So I'm able to create hand lettering with lyrics to songs or Bible versus that really means something to me and what was happening at the time. So I find these also to be a nice way of memory planning, because when I look back on this week, I'll remember why I lettered those particular phrases and know just what was happening at the time so Once I'm done, I'll usually add some journaling and then pop my pages right back into my happy planner. I find this to be really convenient and a really fun way to customize things to be exactly the way I enjoy them and we're done. I hope that you guys have enjoyed this lesson and feel more confident to be able to take your personal artwork and lettering and create beautiful stickers for your planner. 9. Multi-tasking Genius--Sketch & Cut At Once: one of the great futures about the cameo three and nor Models is the dual carriage holder, which allows you to complete two different tasks in one job. So in this particular lesson, I will be showing you how I set up a document or a design to cut and sketch all at once. So I'm going to grab this image from these stickers job that I created in the previous lesson, and I'm just copying and pasting that into a new document. Once I've done that, I'm going to go over to my trace panel, which again looks like the little butterfly Click and drag over the entire image and hit trace based on your particular design. You can adjust the threshold to get the lines that you want for your design because I want some detail here. I'm not going to bump the threshold all the way up. I just want to be able to see the basic shape of the flowers and leaves because I know I want to refine this a little bit further. I'm going to select my traced object hit object release compound path, and now you can see that all of those little elements are now individuals. So if I click on them while holding down the command or shift key, I can select multiple little segments or any little bits that I do not want all together at the same time and then hit Delete. This would also be the time that you would individually adjust any points if you so desire . I'm gonna leave it like this because this is the look I want in this particular project. And once you are done adjusting cropping, deleting everything, you can click and drag to select your entire image hit, object and then make compound path. This will make your entire image one nice long line for your machine to read, and now it's time to create the cut lines for my actual divider. So I'm going to go into my file and grab the largest size, because that is the size of planner that I have, along with the little rectangular tab that I used to create those easy to grab little taps . An important little tip here is to actually copy and paste your cut lines into your new file so that you keep your original file nice and crisp and clean and ready to use for future projects. At this point, I realized that I did not have the correct dimensions in my page setting. So I went ahead and just that to 12 by 12 inches, and now you can see that my file will work and be cut in the dimensions that it's already set at. So I'm going to click and drag over that little rectangle tab. Click and drag to select it as well as a divider. And I'm going to select the Weld option from my top bar menu, and you can see that it now cuts off that excess material on my rectangular piece there, and I get a nice tab included into my divider. The reason I have separated thes two elements is so that you can create the tabs anywhere alongside the divider that you please. Now I'm going to adjust the size of my floral sketch, and an important part of this entire process is to change the line color. You can find us in the line style panel and then click on the color to bars, and you can choose any color that you like. I'm choosing blue since it's obviously stands out apart from red. Next, I'm going to draw a rectangle, and you can do that by selecting it from the Shapes panel on the left hand side. And I'm just going to create a frame here. And the easiest way for me to do that in this particular case was to draw the rectangle, grabbed the knife tool on the left hand side and simply draw a line to separate that bottom line from the rest of the rectangle. And this just separated that line so that then I could select it individually and delete it . So now I have this nice frame that I can adjust the points on by double clicking and have that go exactly where I want it into my floral sketch. And I'm liking how that looks so because this is also going to be sketched. I need to change the line color as well, to match the same color that I used with the floral sketch. At this point, I'm going to click and drag, select both the frame and the floral sketch, and I will hit object, make compound path. All that's left now is to look at your overall design and decide if there are any finishing touches you'd like. I am personally going to make this a bit larger, and I also want to center it within my divider. So I'll select both items, go over to my transform panel and hit the horizontal and vertical Aligned Center options. And now we're ready to send our job to the machine. So click on Send at the top right hand corner and we'll be taking advantage of the dual carriage options with their Cameo three and create two different jobs for the machine to execute all at once. So the first thing I'm going to do is select watercolor paper from my material dropped down , which I have created myself, and this simply has a cut depth of four with a speed of five and a force of 15. I also chose to have it passed twice, and next I'll be working with what tool number two will be doing, and Tool Number two will be sketching. So I'm going to a select card stock plane from my drop down menu just because it has sketching as an option. And then I will click on the cut action and choose sketch. Next, I'll click on my floral frame and choose sketch on Tool number two, and you'll see that that changes the cut line toe blue, which indicates it's a different action now, where you see tool. I'm going to change that to pen holder because I will be using ah, personal pen from my stash and everything looks good here. So now we can set up our cutting mat and then send are designed to the machine. So first of all, I've grabbed my cutting mat and I will be attaching my watercolor paper to it. Next, I'm going to grab my pen holder tool, and this is an extra accessory that does not come standard with the machine, but it comes with three different sizes to hold any pen that you already have and your stash. I will be using a pig mom micron pen in the size double 05 Getting it to where, Ah, it fits nicely on the pen and then screwing it into the pen holder. And you can see here that it is nice and secure, and very little should be showing from the actual pen holder tool. And that is key So you do want to test this a little bit to make sure that everything is where you need it. Put it into your cutting machine. Make sure everything is set up correctly with your blade settings and everything is locked into place and then hit. Send on your software and your machine will now get to work. Now that our machine has done all of the work for us, we simply need to remove our project from the leftover paper. Because these tabs are so tiny and watercolor paper is the bit stiffer, It helps to use a little weeding to like the one you see here. So, once I had everything weeded, I now have my tab perfectly beautiful, ready to go. And all I need to do now is add my paint and get this looking the way I want to. So I will be adding water color lettering and the phrase that I will be lettering is I won't let you go. And that is from a switch foot song of the same name. If you want to look it up, it's a fantastic song. So I am watercolor lettering here. And if you are interested in learning more about how to letter with watercolor and paintbrushes. Check out my class on watercolor lettering in my channel page. Once I've done all my lettering, I'm going to go ahead and paint my flowers and leaves and get everything looking the way I personally want. And there you have it. I'm in love with the finished product, and I love the flexibility of having the machine create the cut file for me, as well as putting my own artwork to paper and getting it toe look exactly the way I want it to. 10. Custom Planner Cover with Foil : one of the fun things about the happy planner specifically is the ability to switch out your covers. Remember, I'm here to show you the techniques that you need to make your own personal artwork. With what you have on hand, I'm just showing you the endless possibilities there are and making things to my personal taste. Okay, let's get back to the Dorial. So I'm gonna be making a custom foiled cover using my Sylhet machine. The first thing I'm going to do is create the artwork. So I'm going to set up my document the way I usually do, making sure all of my borders aren't in place and the dimensions are correctly set, which in this case is 8.5 by 11. And I'm going to click and drag and drop my artwork into the software. Now again, I did create this myself on my iPad pro with the apple pencil in procreate Now because I'm going to be foiling it. I'm not going to just print it as is. So I'm going to go to the trace panel on the right hand side, hit select trace area and click and drag over the entire design. Now, at this point, I was thinking I was going to do a whole page, but I ended up changing things a little bit later, as you will see. So once you have selected all of your art hit trace and then dragon, drop your actual image off to the side click object released compound path, and we're gonna deal with the artwork hands on to make sure that it works with the foiling technique I'm going to be using. So I'm gonna click that little banner and move it out of the way because I know that it will get lost in translation. I'm going to select all of the elements in that your and make it just a little bit larger so that it stands out. Once I'm doing all of that, I can click and select all of the image hit, object and make compound path. This just makes it all one element again and much easier for the mission to deal with. Now for the fun part. I'm going to go to this sketch panel on the bottom right hand side and you'll see this available regardless of what machine you have. But some of the options may not be there. If you don't have a cameo three or above, I'm going to click that spiral with the box border around it, and that will fill my design so that I get a completely full sketched piece. I'm going to pull that arrow down to make sure that it's really filled in, and you'll see that now everything is red, which means that the machine will sketched all of that in and fill in my design. Next, I'm just going to center it by going to the transform panel and making sure that everything is centered in the page. Now I'm going to go to send, and I'll be choosing this studying that I created, which is foil watercolor paper so that I know I can go back to it every time I'll click that and choose the sketch feature here. At this point, you need to decide whether using a pen holder tool if you are using an actual pen or sketch pin in the case that I'll be doing here with the foil quill. This is a separate device that you can purchase individually from your from your machine that will work across all electronic cutting machines. I'll posit here so that you can see the specifications that I'll be using, and I find that this works really well. I do recommend using watercolor paper for this because it's nice and sturdy and will hold up to the foiling process. The foil quill uses heat activated foil, and it comes in two formats pre cut four by six sheets or long rules that come in a 12 by 30 feet. I think it is dimensions, so I'm just going to measure out my foil here from the role because my design will be larger than the four by six sheets that I have. So I'm just measuring it out here and cutting it down to fit my entire page. You don't want it to be on that sticky map, because Sticky Matt will pull some of that foil off, and it'll make it really hard to get it off later in the future. One thing to keep in mind that's very important when using the spoil is that you want to keep it taut, so you need to use washi tape to hold it down in place. I actually should have used more than this and made sure that all of the edges and corners of my foil were taped down. Now the foil quill is a heat tool, so it needs to have at least 10 minutes to heat up. And it comes with a little shield that you put underneath it to keep you to keep it from burning your machine or melting anything. All we need to do now is hit. Send on our machine and give it a couple minutes. It's going to take a little bit of time for the software to kind of catch up so it will sketch. It just takes some time because this is a lot of work. This process does take quite a long time for your machine to complete, but the results are fabulous. This year is the perfect example of why you should use more tape rather than less, because that foiled didn't move around a bit with the machine, and I didn't get perfect coverage right in that upper leaf. So I decided to actually trimmed down my design. I didn't like the whole page. Look, it just didn't work out the way I wanted it to, so I just cut a border all around my design and I cut some scrapbook paper down to size. I cut it fate and 1/2 by 11 and I just made it double sided so that both sides of my cover would look nice. I'm using a tape adhesive that is permanent to adhere the papers and the design to each other. Once I had everything in place looking exactly the way I wanted it was time to laminate. I decided to laminate my cover so that it would be sturdy and hold up to the elements and being picked up and moved around and regularly opened. So I'm putting it into a laminating sleeve, and then I'll run it through my laminate er at the highest setting. Since it is several layers. Once everything has been laminated, it's time to put in those cut notch marks so that it'll fit perfectly on my happy planners . So I'm gonna put it on my cutting mat, and I went ahead and just did the edge of the laminated sheet. But I think in the future I might actually have it cut into the actual paper. But that is just something that is personal preference. So I'm gonna go back into my still await studio software, and I'm gonna go into that file that I've created with all the different sizes to go into the happy planner. And I'm gonna take that largest size. But I'm going to manipulate it a little bit here because I don't want those actual all those cut lines to go in. I just want the notch lines so that it'll fit into the happy Planner brings. So I'm gonna take the knife tool, and I'm just going to slice very carefully down those notches. And then I'm going to click the rest of that rectangle and move it off to the side, and you can see I'm just left with the actual notches and the lines in between. With that slicing action, we've separated all of these little pieces from each other, so I'm just going to select those little lines in between each of the notches, and you can select multiple things by holding down the command or the shift. Keep and just click while holding down those keys and you'll be able to multi select and then hit delete to get rid of all of those lines and all we're left with now are those notches. So I'm going to select them all and hit object, make compound path. And that just makes it one unit that the machine reads as one action. So now we're ready to send this to the machine, and I'm just going to make sure that it's aligned exactly where I want it. And I can do that with the transform panel. I'm going to be using the clear sticker paper setting, which worked really well. I would recommend a bumping up at least one more blade depth because I did have to individually go in and peel a lot of those with my weeding tool, which is this little hooked do Dad. That is a wonderful thing to have. So I was able to just use that weeding tool to pop out each of those little not chance from the laminated cover, and it popped right into those rings perfectly, and I was really impressed with how clean I was able to get these cut lines to be. So, as you can see, it pops into the planner really well and it looks great. I really enjoy it feels sturdy it feels nice, and it's nice to have my own personal stamp and to have artwork. That means something to me on my planner that I see every day. 11. No iPad? No Problem! How to Use PixScan to Digitize Your Non-Digital Art: as a bonus, I thought it would be fun to show you how you can take artwork that you put on other mediums in this case watercolor paper, and still use the technology of silhouette studio to cut those things out and place them in a variety of places. So I went ahead and I painted thes little watercolor vignettes. Almost. And once they were all done, I pulled out this funny thing called the pick scan. Matt, this is extra. You can buy it to go with your silhouette machine, and it allows you to put anything in that space, those rectangles there and cut it out using the technology of silhouette studio. So it is a sticky map. I'm gonna place my watercolor paper on there, and then you need to take a picture. I usually do this with my phone and you want to make sure that that Matt is on something contrast ing so you can see here. I just simply put the mat on my carpet and I took a photo. Then you go into your silhouette studio and it's time to actually work with your image. Is the beauty of this technology? Is that you can cut things out, or use artwork from like your child or from scrap of paper and digitize that in silhouette studio and cut it out. So what you need to do is click on the pick scan settings and find the photo that you took of your mat. You want to make sure that you've gotten the entire Matt into view and that you can see all of the black marks on your map. So I'm just going to look for that image and hit import, and you can also scan if you prefer to use a scanner. Now, if you get this notification that says no calibration is there. This is an important step you'd want to go ahead and do to ensure that your machine will actually cut your images correctly. So you're going to hit the show calibration card and it'll open another window. You want to print this piece of paper exactly the way it is, and then you'll take a photo of this with your phone or whatever camera you are using. In this case, I'm using an Apple iPhone seven, and you can see this is the way it looks. Once it's printed, and you want to take a photo that includes all of those dots. And this is the photo that I took, so you're going to go back into your picks, scan settings and hit that little plus sign button and find the photo of your picks Can calibration and hit import. It'll recognise your phone or camera that you're using there, and you want to make sure that that is selected from now on, and now you can import that. Picks can Matt Photo, and it should work and calibrate for you automatically. Once the software is done uploading, you should see your artwork pop up in the design settings area, where you can now work individually with your images. From here, the process is very similar to what we've done with our digital images. I'm going to trace these images, but because it's on textured watercolor paper, I'm going to do them one at a time instead of all at once like I would do with my digital images. So I'm going to hit the trace button, click and drag over the image and adjust the threshold until I get it toe as close as I can get it to the image now because I'm personally gonna be cutting these out of my paper. I'm just going to hit trace outer edge. I will repeat the process with the rest of the images. Now, if you wanted to digitize these images to use in other ways, rather than cutting it out of the actual paper, you could hit trace and detach. As you can see, I've created a nice, really tight cut line border all around my image, and I'll use that as the basis to create my offset image a little bit later. So I'll just continue the process of tracing. Each of these elements are images on their own, and then I'll work with them individually if they need it. Because these last two images were simpler and had enough space between them. I just went ahead and trace them together. If you do this, just make sure you go toe object release compound path to separate them from each other, and this also allows you to click and aly any of the little stray bits that may have been picked up in the trace. Once you have finished editing any of those little stray bits or separated them from each other. Make sure you just go back and make that compound path in the same area you found it in. This just allows the machine again to read it as one unit. Now the image fall in the air came out really jagged E because the colors were so faint. So I'm going to actually work with the points individually. So I'm going to release the compound past so I can quickly delete any of those extra superfluous little bits. And then I'm gonna go in and actually edit each of those individual points by simply double clicking and working with those points. The point editing menu panel will automatically pop up when you start working with these points, so just by double clicking on the cut line, you'll see all the little dots pop up. And these are all points, which represent movements that your machine is going to make with your blade. And that's why we want to fix this because we don't want those jagged, uneven cut lines on our really nice artwork. So by individually clicking on a point, you can then decide what to do with it. I'm going to be deleting quite a fit of them just to get them out of the weight, because I actually need fewer points to get smoother lines. You can also decide whether you want a point to act like a curve and give you these little handles that you can then pull and push and move around in order to give you those curves that you want just by hitting the little curve option again, I'm going to be deleting most of these and just working with a few that I actually need. Aziz. You'll see. The end result is ah, lot fewer points and much smoother lines. Now that I've created cut lines for every single one of these, I'm going to create the offset cut lines that I actually want. So I'm gonna go to the offset panel, which looks like the star within a star, and I'm gonna hit offset automatically. You'll see that it creates a nice little border around each one of my images, and this is exactly the kind of look that I am going for. So I'm going to actually delete the original cut lines so that I don't get a double cut by accident. I have done that before, so you want to make sure that any cut lines you don't want are either off of your design work space or you delete them. Once you've done all this, it's actually time to send your work to the machine. Now it's important to note that you did not move your artwork anywhere off of that Matt while you were working, because where your cut lines say they are is where your machine thinks they are. So you want to make sure that your artwork stays exactly where it is when you took that picture to make sure that all of your cut settings are correctly in place and send it to your machine. Now for some reason, my machine was acting glitchy and kept throwing the pick scan Matt through and wouldn't read it correctly, so I actually taped it to my original cutting map to make sure it was a long enough, and you can see that the cut settings came out beautifully. I was so happy with the results, and now I can use thes images that I created myself with watercolor paper anywhere that I like, because this class is all about planner accessories. I'll be putting them in, my planner, so I'm just going to make them into stickers by putting adhesive on the back. And I'll also make one of them into a clip you could easily use, Ah, hot glue gun or permanent adhesive to make sure that it stays in place. But I was really impressed with how easily this worked and the ability to take something that I made in a medium I really enjoyed and put that into practice with my planner again. Using the pick scan Technology is a really great alternative to using digital methods and allows you to draw or paid directly on to the paper of your choice and still benefit from the features of the silhouette software and the silhouette, cameo or portrait machines. 12. Upload Your Project: I really hope that you guys have enjoyed this class and learning all of the tips and tricks that I have learned along the way to create some really beautiful, customized planner accessories. I would love to see some of the things that you guys create with your silhouette studio and my machine. If you make any planner accessories, please take a picture and upload it to the project section in the class. I would love to see what you come up with, and I know that seeing your creations will spark creativity and myself and the other cities in this class. If you're not sure how to upload a project, I've provided a quick demo for you. Once you've taken your pictures head on over to the class page on skill share. Click on your project to get started, Scroll down until you see Create your project and click on it. You should see a page that allows you to upload photos and write a description of your work . Click on upload image and select your photos from wherever you saved them. Right. Any information you'd like to share with everyone and include any other photos you'd like for us to see maybe your process feel free to add any skill tags so that others can see your work finally hit. Publish. Congratulations. Your work is now visible for other students to interact with and be inspired by. If you're hungry for more, check out my class channel page for the rest of the classes that I've already taught. I focus on lettering, watercolor and digitizing those elements to create even more things like with our silhouette cameo machines. You could also find me on Instagram, my website and YouTube. All of that is linked below. And I would love to see you there and interact with you all over the into it. Thanks for watching by.