Digitize Your Lettering for Cutting Machines (Cricut & Silhouette!)

1. Digitizing Intro: welcome to my channel. My name is Anna, and I'm a self taught hand lettering and calligraphy artist. My classes focused on giving you helpful and practical tips that will get you started on your own lettering journey or to help you improve the skills you've already developed. This class focuses on digitizing your lettering designs in the simplest way possible, so that you can use that one design in a multitude of ways. With this method, I will show you how to use your digitized lettering specifically for cutting machines like silhouette or cricket, which will allow you to create a multitude of products again with just your one design, I will walk you step by step through the process of digitizing your lettering with either your iPad or your paper designs and give you the flexibility to use whichever software you have accessible. I will show you how to digitize your lettering, an adobe illustrator, the Silhouette design studio and the cricket design space. I will also give you a brief rundown of how you can use your digitized lettering and cutting machine together to create a variety of professional looking products. You can use thes techniques to open up your own handcrafted shop, make party to core personalized clothing and much more. The possibilities are truly endless. Be sure to follow me and check out my channel page to see what other classes I already offer and any classes that come in the future. Now let's jump into the first step of digitizing your lettering. 2. Digitizing & Cutting Supplies: supplies for this class are minimal yet substantial. To digitize your lettering, you need software. I will be showing you how to use Adobe Illustrator, the cricket design Space and the Silhouette Design Studio. You don't need to know how to use all three, just the one that makes the most sense for you, depending on which cutting machine you have or preferred. If you plan to use your designs with a cricket or silhouette cutting machine, you'll need one of those as well. I personally owned the silhouette cameo, too, but the majority of the techniques will work with most of these machines. As far as any other supplies, you'll simply need to buy the right material for the project you plan to make. You can cut a huge variety of supplies with these machines. I'll be showing you sums projects with sticker paper, adhesive vinyl and he transfer vinyl. But there are so many other materials you can cut and make beautiful items with. For more information on what these machines can do, check out their websites. Remember that you can always leave questions for me and other students in the discussion section of the class 3. Using Your Paper Designs: you don't need to have a fancy tablet or iPad. In order to create designs to digitize, you can simply use paper and a device to take photos like your phone or camera. The best tip I have to create designs that are easy to digitize would be to use bright white paper and dark letters, preferably in black. You can see that I have used both of black brush pit and a black micron pen to create my littering designs. If you want different colors, don't worry. It's easier to add color once you've digitized your design than to deal with the possible frustrations of using a color not easily traced by your software. I wrote out the days of the week to create some custom Daily Planner stickers. If you want to be more pinpointed and strategic in your completion of the design, go ahead and sketch your design and pencil first and then go over it with your dark ink to make sure your design is a sharp as possible before taking it into your digitizing software . Once you've drawn your design the way you like, take a picture of it trying to be sure to get nothing else in the photo and get as little shadow as possible. I like to use a device like this because I find it easy to transfer the photos to my computer using airdrop. Once you've taken your photo, send it to yourself in whichever way you find the most convenient. I like to use air drop, but you could also email it or text it to yourself. Now that we have our photo in the right place, jump into the digitizing software of your choice. 4. Creating Digital Designs: The beauty of technology is that it can often streamline our workflow and help us move between steps more easily and fluidly. For a lettering artist, an iPad is a really handy way to do just that. I personally have an iPad pro an apple pencil, but you can use this technique on other iPads while using a different stylist. I am using the app procreate to create my digital design that I will then digitize in my other software programs. I am going to create a new document with 300 dp I in a 10 by 10 inch format. You can use whichever dimensions you like. However, I would recommend sticking with at least a 300 DP I just for resolution purposes. I personally like to use a grid to keep my lettering consistent. You can access the grid by tapping the tools menu and choosing canvas. You will see an on off slider where you can choose to use that grid. I usually go into the preferences and adjusted to a size appropriate to my design. I will be using a brush that mimics a brush pain that you confined for free by honey Darko . I really like this brush pen and the effect that I get when I use it, I find it gives me a realistic brush pin feel, and I can let her naturally, as I would when using in manual brush marker. The double edged sword of using an app like Procreate is that you can do a high number of revisions in a very short amount of time. The great thing about that is that you contest a bunch of different ideas quickly and easily. Caveat is that you may find yourself tweaking for quite a while and an attempt to get something perfect. I lettered several variations of the word loved before deciding on three versions that I wanted to compare. I did that by lettering, one design at a time on their own layer and hiding them until I wanted to compare. One of my favorite tricks and procreate is the multi layer select. You can use this to quickly size all of the elements in the selected layers at the same time without having to merge them onto the same layer. You can do this by selecting the first layer as you would normally and then swiping to the right on each layer. You want to adjust, then you can tap on the selection arrow and resize as you like, top on one layer to remove the selection and free up all the others. I decided I liked the top, designed the best and wanted to tweak it further and make it a bit more symmetrical. I liked how the bouncy style looked, but I wanted to make it a bit more consistent and easy to read. By having the 1st 1 last letters on the same level, I lowered the opacity on my design and then use that as a guide while drawing my final design on a new layer. Now comes the easy part. Transferring your design over to be digitized. Open up your layers panel and de select the background color. Make sure that your lettering is in a bold color like black, so that it's easier for the software to read during the digitizing process. I recommend again using black and recovering it later, and you're digitizing software if you like. Once you've diesel elected the background color, you should see this great checked background behind your lettering. Now click on the Tools menu and choose share. You want to choose the PNG option so that you're transparent background will be kept intact from here. You cannot choose where you want to send your design. 5. Digitizing In Illustrator: If you want your designs to be the most accessible across all platforms, Adobe Illustrator is a great place to begin now. I'm not a graphic designer or professional, but this is a relatively easy process. If you don't have Adobe Illustrator, you can always try it for free for 30 days. Once you have Illustrator open, you should see a basic information box asking you how you'd like to proceed rather than creating campus. Go ahead and click open and locate the photo of your design. You may have to resize the file depending on how large it is, and you can do that by easily holding down the shift button and pulling on one of the handles on the edges to resize your photo. The shift button allows you to resize your work without working it, so I always make sure to press it. Once you've resized your image to your liking, zoom in far enough so that you can get a solid look at the basic details. I have actually moved my design off of the canvas so I could be sure to see any major changes easily to zoom, hit the Z button on your keyboard and click and swipe with your mouths. Next, you're going to go up to the top menu bar and click on Image Trace and then, okay, it may take a few moments, but you should notice a change pretty quickly. You're transparent. Background should be white now, and when you hover over your design, you should see lines and points light up. If you want to play with it further and get it even more refined, click on the menu icon immediately to the left of the trace. But you can play with the threshold to make curve smoother or sharper and so on. Make sure that the preview button on the bottom left of the pop up menu is clicked so that you can see any changes immediately. Once you like how everything looks, click expand. Your design is now in vector form, and you can further tweak and adjust. To get rid of the white space, go over to the magic wand tool over on the top left corner of your left hand tool menu. Click on the white portion of your design or over the color you'd like to get rid of, and then click delete you should now see everything in that particular color has been deleted, and you are now left with a your individual design. I want to edit my design further, so I'm going to go toe object and then under group. You should now see the individual parts when you hover over them. I wanted to thicken up the outer circle so it would be easier to cut later on. So I clicked on it and then adjusted the stroke. Wait until I was happy with it. The issue I deal with most often when using image trace is a distortion of curves. They could often becomes sharp or wonky. You can remedy this by using the point editing tool or hitting a on your keyboard. You can adjust the curve handles on specific points, especially those on the top and bottom of a curve. Click on them carefully and move them out or in up or down until you get the look you desire. It can actually be helpful to delete points. Sometimes the software adds too many, and the few are. You have the smoother curves you'll find you get. Once you've finished editing, go ahead and group your design together again. Select all of the elements of your design and good, then go to object and group. Now everything will move as one unit once again. There are many ways you can save your files, but I will recommend to first. You should always save an original illustrator file so you can edit later on. For the purposes of this class and the goal of using our designs with a cutting machine, I'm going to recommend saving them as a P and G with a transparent background. This will allow you to complete the same process much quicker in your design software or allow you to incorporate them into other designs. Easily. Illustrator is great if you want to have access to these designs in a format that is always useful. However, if you are only planning on using them with cutting machines, it may be simpler to go straight to the design software of your corresponding machine and complete all of this once rather than twice. But let's jump in and take a look at the software for both cricket and Salou it so you can gain an understanding of how to complete this process on those platforms 6. Digitizing in Cricut Design Space: the cricket designs base is very user friendly and requires the least amount of a learning curve. When you're in a new project canvas, click on the upload menu option on the lower left hand corner. Click on upload image and select or drag and drop your photo into the upload window. You could use either a photo of your paper design or a PNG of your digital design. The easiest is, of course, a digital design, but it is possible and relatively easy to upload your paper design. If you choose to use the paper design, select your photo. Try to get a photo with his little shadow as possible. Play with your contrast and brightness in your photo editing features before uploading it to the cricket design space. I found out the hard way that this makes things much easier in the long run. When you see your photo in the upload screen, click on the different resolution options until you find when that suits your photo. Because I had too many shadows in my photo, I ended up choosing complex click Continue. At this point, the software allows you to select areas you do not want in your photo. This is a very helpful feature. I clicked on all of the background areas and the spaces within my loops and closed letters to remove the background. After I had done as much as possible with the select Any race tool, I chose the eraser tool. You can adjust the size and click and drag over any little pixels that have remained behind . Clicking the preview tool can help you see any areas that you may be missing. Once you have gotten everything is cleaned. Oppa's possible click continue. You can now save your design as a printing cut design or a simple cut design. You can also name and add tags. Do your designed to help you find it more easily in the future. You may now insert your photo into a design canvas and adjust the color and size click. Make in the upper right hand corner to access the cutting features of your cricket machine . Right. If you want to digitize a digital design, that process is much easier and very quick. Simply drag and drop your PNG file into the upload window or selected from the pop up window that comes up. Click on the simple resolution Choice as yours design should be high. Contrast with a transparent background. Choose whether you want it to be saved us a printing cut file or simply a cut file. You can now insert your photo into the design canvas and customize it further. That's it. If you're wanting to see some of the projects these cutting machines can help you accomplish, let's jump into the next lessons where I scratched the surface on all the projects you can create. 7. Digitizing In Silhouette Design Studio: you don't need to have Adobe Illustrator to create digitize designs for use with your silhouette cutting machine of choice. You can actually use the design studio software to digitize both your paper and iPad designs. Whether you have decided to use paper or a digital iPad drawn designed, the process is the same. I prefer to dragon drop my image straight into my software program. We're going to trace Justus. We didn't illustrator at the time of filming. It looks like a butterfly on the right hand menu of the design studio. Click on it and select trace area. Begin on a corner of the design and click and drag until you have covered the entire design . Once you unclip, the program will automatically traced the design and cover in a yellow Phil. This yellow area indicates the area the software has picked up on. You can adjust it by clicking on the threshold and playing with some of the options. Once you're happy with the trace, click trace on the bottom of your menu. You should now see a red cut line in the outline of your design. From here, you can keep your original for use with printing or move it off to the side. If you want to cut the design as I did. If you save the entire design is a salute desired file. You were retained. All of the elements in your are bored so you can save it for future use or delete anything . Don't plan to use later on. Now, if you want to clean up any harsher, jagged lines, you can zoom in and edit the individual points much as we did an illustrator. But with a few tweaks. Once again, you can click on the space bar while working to move around your design without having to switch tools, which is very helpful. When you double click on your design, you'll see all of the individual points highlighted. You can click on them individually to delete or adjust them. I find it helpful to actually get rid of some points as they provide a smoother curve when you get rid of them. Justus you saw an illustrator. However, if you want to adjust the curve, check on the right hand side to see which option is selected. Often you will find that the corner option is selected for a point when we really want a curve, click on make a curve and you'll find that the software provides the handles for you to adjust those curves. Not only can you adjust the curves, but you can also simply move points around to create a smother line or adjust spacing. Once you're done, you may find it necessary to make your up strokes a bit thicker, so your machine will cut them smoothly and you'll have an easier time applying the cut material. As you can see here, the up strokes are too thin and too close together to get a nice cut. You can easily solve this problem by creating a slight offset on the lower end of the right hand. Man. You you see a star within a star shape that is the offset menu, and as soon as you click on it, you'll see a very dramatic and large offset applied to your design. You can adjust that by clicking or typing into the distance option. I usually end up choosing 0.254 point 02 but that varies depending on your design. Once you like how it looks, click apply. You can now move your original trace design out of the way and cut the offset design. This could be helpful later on in other ways as well, and I'll show you in a couple future lessons. Sometimes the offset option could actually separate elements of your design. To remedy this, simply click on object and group, and then your design will be one piece again. Now you can either save or cut your design. If you'd like to cut it, make sure that you size it to the appropriate size. Click on Send and choose your material and check the blade depth before sending your work to the machine for a final cut. 8. Family Photo Sign: one of the most obvious and easiest ways to use your cutting machine is to create your own home decor. Before you begin any project, check the blade settings recommended for the material you intend to cut. Adjust your blade accordingly. Be sure to line up your material evenly along the lines provided as guides and adjust the rollers to the correct size. Basically, the roller should be near the ends of both sides of your material. Click load a material on your machines. Touchscreen. With your machine connected, click the send button on your computer for machine should react immediately and begin cutting your design. Once you're designers finished hit, unload until your material is free and cut your design free of your material. Most of these roles come with a great on the back, which makes it really easy to evenly cut your designs out and keep your edges even for future projects. Now that your design is in a manageable size, begin to weave the excess material. I always like to start with the largest pieces by pulling out the corners. Be very careful when pulling your material, as some types can be very thin and prone to tearing. Keep in mind that most of these materials are also very sticky and can easily stick together and wreak havoc. Once you've gotten rid of the major excess weed out the closed areas of your letters. I like to use a hooked weeding tool to lift these spaces and avoid damaging my design. Now that your design is completely free of any excess material, cut out a piece of transfer tape that will cover your entire design. I find that the easiest way to apply transfer tape is to begin with one corner and carefully stick it down little by little Onley, exposing more transfer tape as you have adhered it to the design. This is the best way to avoid air bubbles or getting your transfer tape laid incorrectly. Flip over your design and remove the backing from your designs without Onley. Your transfer tape is attached again. Be careful as it can sometimes be easy to tear or rip it, depending on how sticky or thin your material is. Finally, your design is ready to be adhered to your final surface. The great thing about transfer tape is that it is transparent or semi transparent and allows you to see where you're placing your design. The best way to adhere your design without any air bubbles or Bunches is to start on either one end or in the very centre, being sure to keep other elements of your design free of the surface until you have every part attached. Rub over the design with either your fingers or a rubbing tool to make sure everything is adhered strongly and that there are no air bubbles. Peel away your transfer tape slowly focusing on the corners and ends. I customized my would sign further by heart, going from copper clips that will allow me to switch out photos once the glue is set. I clipped in some photos and there it iss ah, fully customized, affordable and unique element of home decor for your shop or for your home. Uh, 9. Designing & Cutting Stickers: creating stickers for planners and scrapbooking is one of the fun and easy projects you can create with your digitized lettering. Stickers make a great gift or shop item, and the ability to customize them completely with your own lettering and designs is appealing to many. I'm going to show you two different styles of stickers that you can create. There are many more, but we'll focus on these. The first is probably the easiest in terms of the actual cutting of the stickers I drew and digitally painted some florals and letters, some fall phrases. I kept each design and lettered phrase on their own respective layers to make it easy to resize and adjust replacement as needed. Once I was done designing everything, I resized all of the designs to keep their sizing consistent and paid attention to the margins. Since I planned on printing them just as we did before, make sure to share your designs with your computer by making the background transparent and saving it as a PNG files. Now that we have the stickers in the software, you can see how easy it is to customize them because our background is transparent because I intend to print thes. Be sure that you include the registration marks on your canvas so that you can place your stickers within them. If anything falls outside of those marks, the silhouette machine will not cut them. Be sure to adjust the measurements to reflect the size of paper. Your printing on I decided I wanted to create stickers with the general shape, so I used the shape tool on the left to draw squares, rectangles and circles around my designs. These are the cut lines that your machine will read after you've placed all of your cut line shapes around your design. Print your document. It's very important not to move your designs around anymore after you've printed, or you will get cut lines in the wrong places. Do all of your adjusting before you print. Once you've printed, attach your document to your cutting mat, making sure that you line up your edges, coming Lee and make sure that everything looks as it does on the screen. Click send and choose the correct material from the drop down menu. I happen to use clear sticker paper, adjust your blade depth accordingly and load your cutting mat. If you want to cut just the lettering for some stickers and don't want a generic shape around them, I'll show you a couple tips and tricks. Once I imported my photo from my paper design, I traced the image. I now have cut lines that follow my lettering very closely. Edit your lettering toe look the way you want in terms of size and color. If you want to change the color, you want to select the design and choose object. Then make compound path. Grouping won't work, as the design will fill with color in strange ways. Once you've made it into a compound path, select the color you like by choosing the color panel on the right hand side and choose fill color. Remember to make sure to add registration marks and adjust your documents size settings before you print or cut from personal experience, I recommend creating an offset around them so that you could remove your stickers and place them more easily, especially if they're tiny. Select the design. Do you want to create an offset cut line for you? Can either select one at a time or all of them at the same time, and apply the same offset for all of them, which is convenient. You can select multiple items by clicking off to the side and dragging over your designs or by holding down the shift button and clicking on each individual design. Click on the offset panel and choose your offset. Now that we're ready to cut the stickers, click send and choose your material. An important thing to know is that we want to be sure to pick the correct lines for cutting . We don't want the initial design to be cut, just the offset lines we finished setting up a minute ago. In order to do that, click on Phil de, selected the colored portion of your design and select the no color fill option to cut the offset lines. Now that all of our settings are in place, we're ready to send our file to the machine for cutting. You can see from my demo that the lettering design with the offset is much easier to place than the lettering design. We cut very close. You now have some beautiful custom stickers to use in your planners and scrapbooks, or to sell in your very own sticker shop. 10. Creating Custom Drinkware: Another fun way to use your cutting machine is to customize drink, where I'll be showing you a coffee mug and a stainless steel water bottle. These items make great gifts for anyone, and you can customize them for events like weddings for a fix, you NoDoz of niche interests like coffee and cats, or just identify someone's personal water bottle. Something to be aware of is which type of vinyl you use for these items. I have put them in the top rack of my dishwasher, and things have turned out fine. But if you plan to sell them, you may want to make sure to use permanent final or have a disclaimer in your description to hand wash only mugs and water bottles can be a bit tricky toe. Apply vinyl on because they're round and they can be difficult to keep steady. The roundness of the surface can also make it difficult to apply the vinyl evenly. A couple things to keep in mind is toe. Always start by applying the center of your design first. This allows you to make sure that your placement is even and readjust easily without having to remove an entire decals. if you place it somewhere you don't want. Ah, helpful tip is to mark the spot you want to use. Isn't anchors that you can be sure you're putting everything in the right place? Once you've attached the center of your design, the edges will follow easily. Go slowly to avoid any air bubbles and use your hands or a scraper tool to get out any of those air bubbles or wrinkles. This design is a great example of how making sure that your cut lines connect make it super easy to weed. To keep the water bottle from rolling around, I put something heavier on either side to keep it stable again. Be sure to apply the center of your design first. You can see here that I actually folded the decals kind of like a taco and applied the center first, and then the sides naturally follow. I always recommend pulling your transfer tape off by starting at a corner and pulling at an angle. I find that the vinyl stays on your surface more readily and is less likely to be pulled back up by the transfer tape, as always, moves slowly so that you could easily fix problems as they happen, instead of pulling too quickly and having a big problem to fix or needing to start over again. Items like thieves make great gifts because everybody wants one, and personalizing it makes it seem special. 11. Creating Custom T Shirts: creating your own custom. Apparel is one of the big bonuses of cutting machines. There are several different ways you can do this, and I'll show you two of them. The first way to create your own custom shirt is by cutting a stencil and using fabric paint. I decided to use a fabric paint and made my own concoction by adding metallic acrylic paint to a fabric paint medium. If you are using fabric paint, be sure to insert cardboard or some other material between the layers of your shirt tow. Avoid paint transferring are soaking through to the other areas of your shirt. The great thing about stents is that they are reusable, and you can use them to create your own screens for screen printing or just use them for small batches like I did here. I used their adhesive stencil material, which is really convenient because it stuck to the shirt and I didn't have to worry about it moving around or needing to tape it down. Be sure to keep any small pieces that you need handy. If they are attached to the overall design, you will need to manually stick them into their respective places. I found this to be pretty easy. Once I had everything ready and my paint combined smoothly. I took a sponge dauber and carefully pounced the paint over the design, being sure to cover everything evenly. I went over it a couple times until I reached the level of opacity that I wanted. It's hard to capture on camera how pretty this pain is in person. It looks rather dark on screen, but it's a really pretty metallic rose gold paint. Be sure to follow the directions for your pain and allowed to drive fully before washing or wearing. I went ahead and remove the stencil as my paint was drying to give everything a chance to dry smoothly and not have any peeling. Afterwards, I left my cardboard in between the layers of fabric and let it dry overnight. If you do want to reuse your stencil, carefully remove all of your stencil pieces and attach it back to the backing that we had before. You can now wash your stencil and have it nice and clean for future use. The next way you can create custom apparel is with heat transfer Vinyl. This is my personal favorite for a number of reasons. The end results look very professional at last a long time, and it's not as messy or time consuming as the paint Candies. There are a couple things to keep in mind when using heat Transfer vinyl. First of all, be sure to mirror your design. This ensures that your design won't be backwards on the shirt. This is because you need to cut it from behind so the shiny side actually goes face down into your cutting machine. Take your time weeding the excess material from your design because everything has slipped around. It could be a little confusing when you're trying to figure out what to get rid of and what the Keith. Once you weeded everything, prep your surface. You can use a heat press if you have one, but I just use an iron because I had a handy and I wanted to show you that you can get great results with basic supplies. Next, place your design where you want it and smooth down the sticky backing. Be sure to use a piece of fabric or ahi pad between the design and the iron so that the plastic doesn't melt heat the entire surface of the design until everything is applied into the fabric. I tested the edge and found that I needed to heat it longer. Once the vinyl is bonded to the fabric, slowly peel away your plastic. I went ahead and replaced my fabric and ran the iron over my entire design again, just to be sure that everything was completely adhered. If you look closely, you should be able to see the fabric fibers through the heat. Transfer vinyl. That will be your proof that everything is fully bonded and your shirt is ready to wear. 12. Your Project: thanks for following along as we digitized are lettering and scratch the surface of what we can do and repair our digital lettering pieces and a cutting machine. I'd love to see what you've done with your newfound knowledge, So please upload your project to the project section of the class. I love to see your digitized lettering. Or if you've even created any products using your cutting machine and lettering designs, please let us see them. If you have any requests for specific classes, please leave them in the comments section below and I'll take those into consideration. I'd love to know what you're interested in learning. 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 selector 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.