Using Silhouette Studio as a Graphics Programme

This month I created a “Print and cut” design using the Silhouette Studio Software. This is something I haven’t tried before as I’ve only just got a colour printer. We’ve been using a Brother Mono Laser Printer (which I love) but for Print & cut projects it’s seriously lacking – in colour that is!

I like using the Studio software as a simple graphics programme and last month created a banner for my online shop. The Steps are the same, except  this time I printed and cut the design. I designed some discount coupons  that I can send to customers with their order. Hopefully this will encourage future return sales 🙂 I wanted the style to match my Banner below although I changed the background colour slightly…

Here’s how I did the coupons:

1. Select page size and set the Registration mark settings to “Show Registration Mark”
2. Draw a square or other shape for the coupon or whatever you are going to make. Mine is 10 x 10 cm but any size is fine as you can adjust this at the end.
3. Offset your shape. Fill both the outside (offset) shape and the inner shape with colour.
4. Select Cut Style – Set the inside shape to “Cut” and the outside shape (Offset) to “No Cut” which means when cut, the colour will bleed right off the edge of the card with no white margins.
5. Group the shapes together.  This is how it looks so far ……hmmm not too exciting yet!:

1.  Add any text you need to each Element and colour fill it with the Bucket tool, remember to colour the outside lines of Text to match & remove the red lines.
2. I constantly used the Align tool – it makes quick work of lining things up
3. Once you’ve finished part of an element, group it together – It’s very frustrating when you forget and after lining up everything perfectly you move it around and some parts are left behind! CTRL Z (or undo) will fix that but if you group parts as you go along it saves you the trouble. For example, once I had coloured in the parts of the tag (I had to ungroup it first to do that) and written and aligned the text within it and below it,  I grouped it all together again so all of the parts moved together when I rotated, resized it etc.
4. If anyone’s wondering – the ribbon is bought to you by the Letter C. In Lavenderia Font. I sliced the bottom off and rotated it and edged it up to the inside of the hole in the tag.
5. Set “No Cut” as you go along too.
6. When grouping parts together sometimes bits disappear!  Select “Object” (Top Left Menu bar) and choose “Arrange”. Select the visible part of the design and move it backwards or Send to the back until the missing parts reappear.  Not lost – just hiding! There’s a shortcut for this at the bottom left too.
7. Lastly, before printing, select the Scissor Icon to double check what is going to cut. As you can see below I didn’t follow my own advice in step 5 and if I’d gone ahead I’d have cut Text that was only meant to print

Before printing adjust the size if desired (group everything together first) – I was using 10 x 15cm (4×6″) photo paper that came with the new printer so I made my coupon small enough (6.5cm)  to fit on that within the registration marks as I only wanted to print a single sample coupon to test it out! The smaller printed size was just right but the project was easier to design in a larger scale and reduce the size at the end.

I realise too that the the “cut” part of this project was pretty basic – being just a square…but well you gotta start somewhere 😉

If all this sounds a bit too much like hard work I’m sharing a version of my file. If you think you’d like to Print & Cut some Discount Coupons for your own online or Market Stall but can’t be bothered designing them from scratch  here’s the file.  I hope you don’t mind pink but I didn’t think you’d want yours exactly  the same as mine! You can edit it with your own details.

To use the Silhouette Studio software to make a web graphic like my banner, follow all of the same steps except there is no need to offset the design at the beginning.  When you are all done designing just take a screen shot of the finished design (turn off the grid settings first) and import it into a graphics programme to crop, resize, remove background etc.
I used Photoshop Elements 10 because that’s what I have but I think it would be just as easy to use Paint or Inkscape or other programmes you are familiar with.
If anyone knows if there’s a better way to save as a graphic in Studio to avoid taking it into another programme to finish  – please share!

This post is my first post as part of “The Silhouette Challenge” where fellow bloggers participate in a monthly challenge to create a new project with their Silhouette Machine.
Please check out the links below to see what everyone else has created in the last month.

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save