Today I’m sharing a type of resource that is usually used by stampers, but with a little adaption is perfectly suitable for Silhouette users. I’m talking about Digital Stamps aka Digis and Digistamps. With a little tweaking you can make fun print and cut designs with them.
Basically they’re images drawn with black outlines similar to the type of image that a rubber stamp would create, except that there’s no stamping involved – just printing out. A stamper would go on to colour the images with copic markers or water colours to cut out and use in their creations.
Today I’m showing how I coloured a Digistamp image in Silhouette Studio to make a print and cut decorative element suitable for a greeting card or other projects. No markers or coloured pencils required!
Tutorial
This is more of an intermediate tutorial and assumes you are already familiar with the following in Silhouette Studio: Importing images, Tracing Tools, Point editing (may be needed depending on design you select) Colour fill and Line Fill Tools and Setting up Registration marks for Print and Cut.
Select the Image
Search on Google images for Digistamps. There are many available either for free or to purchase. (Be copyright aware and check the terms of the image you select) Some images will be great for this technique and others not so! Above is a screenshot of a section of my google image search. The bird on branch image (although adorable) is not suitable for our method but the owl on the right is perfect. The reason? We will be filling the image with colour and it doesn’t work with an open shape. Each section of the design must be completely closed to be able to hold a colour fill to make it suitable for print and cut. Visualize filling the bird’s Santa hat in red, the colour will bleed into the section next to it as the lines are not closed – it will also fill the pom pom and fur trim and body red too.
In traditional stamping and colouring in with pens, markers etc, this wouldn’t matter but if colouring in Silhouette Studio, it’s not going to work. With the owl image, each section is separate and the colour will stay enclosed in each section you fill, making it suitable for our purposes.
The success of this technique rests on the image chosen and the quality of the trace.
Import and Trace
I used a Free Cupcake Image to demonstrate with, which was generously shared here at this blog by Marisa Hopkins of Elegant Snobbery. Marisa shared the image for non commercial use.
- Import image into Silhouette studio
- Select and Trace the image. This may vary depending on the image used but I had the High Pass Filter Box Checked and slid the threshold up to about 56.
- This is the resulting trace above.
- Select the design, right click and ungroup and/or Release compound path. It will look as above
Edit the Design
Take a minute to clean up the image. This is easy to do if the image is enlarged and you zoom right in. In this case I deleted the the Border, all the text, Lots of scattered dots over the image and some of the tiny sections in the design. Depending on the design selected you may have a little cleaning up to do or maybe none at all! Here’s my result – it took me less than a minute.
The Fun part.
- Use the Colour Fill tools to add colour to the image. I also used the gradient fill.
- I also wanted to include the lines as part of my image so I selected everything and changed the line colour to a dark gray from the line colour window.
- In the line style window I changed the line width to give it some weight. This will also ensure the lines will print out. Alternatively, select the lines to be printed and check the “Print lines of selected shapes” option at the bottom of the window.
- At this point, select the entire design and from the cut setting window set the image to “No Cut”
Set the cutting line.
Set the cutting line by ungrouping the image, select only the outside border line and in the Cut setting window set it to Cut Edge.
Alternative: I actually did it slightly differently as I wanted a white border around my Print and Cut design. With the outside border line selected as above, I left it at no cut, but I offset the line to make a slightly larger shape and the offset is the line I set to “cut”. Ensure the cutting line is set to “no print” (line style window as instruction earlier)
When done, regroup the lot together again, and finally, resize your creation as desired and add your registration marks and send to Print and Cut.
Another example and Great Resource.
Where to find your digi files? Well I already mentioned a google search will bring up plenty of options, but I also want to point you in the direction of Bird’s Cards {no affiliation}. I’ve previously mentioned this site in a round up of my favourite Cutting file Sites. Bird offers Cutting Files for sale as well as multiple fabulous free cutting files but….. she also generously shares Digistamp files too.
Here’s another example of colouring a digistamp with Silhouette Studio, I downloaded Bird’s lovely Snowglobe Digistamp and used the Colour Fill, Gradient Fill and Pattern Fill tools. As in the other examples above I changed the lines to gray. I loved the result and look forward to using my print out at Christmas time on a card or decoration.
Try it out and have fun colouring in……..
