Design Your Own Laser-Cut Christmas Ornament

[Music] [Music] my name is amanda chaffin i work at the lane community technology center in hamilton ohio and today i'm going to walk you through the process of designing your own laser cut wooden ornament with our glowforge laser cutter the first thing we're going to do is open up inkscape inkscape is free software that lets you create and edit vector graphics if you don't know where factor graphics are don't worry we'll go over it later in the video for now just go to inkscape.org so open up whatever browser you want and go to inkscape.org and you're going to go to this download tab here you're going to get the current version for whichever operating system you have i have a mac so i'm going to be using that as my software for today so once you download and install that you're going to open up the program just go ahead and open up inkscape and it's going to start to look a little bit like this first thing we're going to do is we're going to open up our document properties to do that you're going to press and hold ctrl shift and d now if you're on a mac like i am it's command shift and d so all of those three at the same time that's going to pull up document properties okay now once we do that we're going to change our units here i prefer to work in inches so i'll change my display units to inches that automatically changes my rulers up here and i'm going to change my units for the actual size of the workspace and now i'm going to change it to 4x4 because as i said i'm making a 4x4 ornament next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to open up snap what that does normally if snapping is enabled if your object is close to a guideline or another object or an edge it'll just boop snap it right to it make it real easy to line up it's convenient for some things but i don't find it convenient for this particular project so i'm just going to turn that off so i'm going to hit snap only when closer than and i'm going to pull each of these all the way down to the bottom just like that okay good all right so now we're going to just close out and i need to make this a little bigger just so that i can see it so i'm just going to zoom in now that we're all zoomed in we're gonna make sure we have a couple of menus up now this fill and stroke menu in this align and distribute menu they might not be up immediately for you so let me show you where to find those okay the first one is the align menu it looks kind of like a little graph it's over here on the right here in the bottom so if you just double click that it'll pull that menu right up and the next one is the fill and stroke menu that's kind of like our paint menu that's going to be right here it looks like a little uh paint brush um on like a page and that's also on the right side so if you just go ahead and double click it there you go has your menus up these are really useful uh little panes to work in okay all right once you have the workspace set up the way you want it we're going to click on our circle tool because we're going to make a circular shaped ornament today so it's over here on the left so go ahead and click it and now you're going to going to go over here to your workspace hold down shift and control and then click and drag to make a circle i'm going to make it nice and brown like that and then what we're going to do is we're going to click our arrow tool here and we're going to select our circle we're going to go over here to our alignment menu and see where it says page we're going to keep relative to the page here [Music] that way we can center up our circle and we're going to click center on vertical axis and then center on horizontal access so once we have this clicked just center both of these and it's going to center it right up with our drawing now we can also change the width and the height so we're going to click this little lock button here this is going to maintain the aspect ratio so we're going to have a perfect circle then we're going to change the width here i'm going to do about 3.75 inches and then hit enter and you see the height automatically was also changed because we locked them together that's what that little lock button did so now we're going to go back here let's go ahead and center align it good so we have a nice ornament shape here in the middle of our workstation now what we're going to do is we're going to save always always save so just go to file save as and then name it whatever you think you will remember i'm going to save mine to the desktop and i'm going to name it ornament i know very creative right went ahead and saved that now we see we have this this big black spot in the middle yours might be another color that's not what we want we want empty space to work with so to do that we go here over here to fill in our fill and stroke menu and we click this little x button here now we also want to stroke now that is an outline that's the outer layer here this is going to be a cut line for us later on so we want to make sure that something nice and smooth for our laser to be able to follow i like to just use this flat color here and 255 on red so it's just plain red and then i go to stroke style that's the next tab up here stroke style and i'm going to change this to one point so there's changing it to points and then here's one and that's going to give us a nice one point red stroke line for our laser to cut out so that's great now we have the basic shape of our ornament ready okay so we have an outline for our ornament here but we kind of want a frame effect we don't want just a just a solid edge so to do that we're going to click on our arrow tool our selection tool here at the top make sure we have our circle selected now we're going to hold down command d or if you're on a windows computer it's ctrl d that's just going to duplicate our little circle here and we are going to fill that actually that way we can tell it apart from the other circle so let's go ahead and click it fill it so now holding down again shifted control we're going to take one of our little corner arrow keys click it and pull it down until we get a nice border shape all right that looks like a good sized border that we have there right i like it so what we're going to do now is we are going to go over here to well first we're going to select it we're going to go over here to fill it's fine to fill that with black let's turn off the stroke here all right and now let's go ahead and select everything so let's go to command a or control a to select everything on the screen then we're going to go to path and exclusion and that's just gonna cut a little hole right out of the center there of our shape so now it's one path and if we go to fill you'll see it'll just fill in that exterior ring so that's kind of what we're looking for in an ornament shape we don't fill it so let's close that and let's make sure our stroke style is consistent it is a little bigger than one point so let's just make it one point all right wonderful so now we want to make a little eyelet at the top so we have a place to hang our ornament it's not hard to do that we're just going to make another circle click our circle tool here just like we did before hold down shift and control and make a nice little circle shape that looks good so now that we have that let's pull this over towards our shape here and remember our alignment tool we can center align this so we're going to command a or control a select everything and we're just going to hit this little button here and center it on the vertical axis so there it is it's all centered now i'm going to click it and i'm going to move it up and all i'm doing to move it up is using my arrow key my up arrow key so that it is touching my ornament all right so i have a nice little circle here right now what i'm going to do is i'm going to combine this shape with this shape just so we can see it a little better here let's fill this and let's turn off the stroke on both of these okay and so let's click our top little eyelet here let's command d or control d to make an another one a new one all right and let's change the color of it so we can see it easily so it's 255 red and hold down shift and control and again we're going to use our little corner arrow just to take it down a little bit so we have a nice little hole there for string good excellent so just like we did before we're going to click that and also our larger eyelet circle there and we're going to go to path and exclusion and it's going to cut a little path right out there so we have a nice little handle nice little eyelet um i actually think i want to lower this a little bit so let's lower that and we can we can manipulate it however we want so here i'm going to take this little bottom arrow i'm going to squash it just a bit so it's up that looks nice i like that it's not quite round it's got a little shape a little dimension to it that looks nice so now we're going to combine this this is our ornament so we're going to go to command a or control a select everything we're going to go to path and union and now this is all one shape okay so we have our basic ornament shape good job now we want to add some trees so for this i went ahead and i opened up chrome and i downloaded a free conifer tree shape from a website called so let me show you what that looks like that's right here it's createzilla and they have free and you can see this is in a public domain license so they have a lot of free public domain um objects here that you can use so i just went ahead and i downloaded it and that is what we're going to use today okay so once you have this downloaded we're going to go back to inkscape and we're going to go to file and import okay so we're just going to import now for me this is in christmas here and you can see it's this pine tree silhouette clip art here and i'm going to open it okay here we want to make sure that you choose smooth here under optimize quality and just click ok all right so here is our little tree so remember when i told you i was going to explain the difference between a vector graphic and a raster graphic well now is that time so this is a raster graphic if you look at the edges here you can see that they're kind of blurry that's because we imported a png file and that information is stored in the computer not as a shape but as pixels just like most of your photos like what you would do in photoshop that kind of thing but that's not really a smooth path for our laser follows so we need to convert it so let's just go up here to path okay and we're going to choose trace bitmap all right and so now this little menu comes up and i'm just going to pull this over here so it's a little easier for us to see it all right excellent so what we're going to do here is the default will probably work fine so let's hit update you can see a little preview here and update and we're going to choose single scan brightness cut off and this threshold here 0.45 is usually the standard and i think that looks pretty good actually gives us plenty of detail so we are just going to stick with that okay and we're going to hit the ok button and you can see it finished because this fill and stroke menu came back up so then you just close out here of your trace bitmap and now you're like well where where's my image it's actually right here it's just been copied right on top of your old one so all you have to do is click and drag all right and now you can already see see how crisp and clear these edges look compared to the old one that's how you know that this is a vector graphic okay so we can get rid of that old raster graphic just click it and hit the delete key on your keyboard and now is a really good time to save so just control or command s to save let's go ahead and position our tray kind of where we want it on our ornament okay so we are just going to click it and we are going to shift it wherever we want i think it would look nice kind of on the edge here kind of near the top for this edge yeah that looks pretty good right okay yeah i like that to kind of make it touch the edge a little bit good okay so now we're going to do command or ctrl d to duplicate so it gives us a copy and i'm going to move that over here to the other side and now we can i'm going to make that a little lower over here and you can adjust your size here you can make this so i'm going to make this one a little skinnier and a little shorter here on this side okay and now again you can command d and we're gonna put one in the middle let's make that one a little taller here and a little fatter we can't control where we put that let's move that one actually a little a little closer and again command d and we're going to make another one here this one i think should be a skinny tree so we're gonna make it skinny and we're gonna pull that down here yeah i think that looks cute a cute little winter scene right i'm gonna drag that one to where there's a little more space here all right so i think it looks pretty good now but i think i want to lower everything so i'm actually going to just click on all my little trees holding down the shift button that way i can click each of them and then i'm going to just use my arrow keys i'm going to nudge them down a little bit to where i think they look good okay and i kind of want to put this little tree here on the side to where it's touching more so i'm just going to click it and i'm going to nudge it again to where i want it and then i think i'm going to do the same thing over here with this little guy i'm gonna nudge him over there we go all right so once i've got the trees where i want them i have a little bit of space up here i think that's going to look really good um i'm actually going to lower these two trees because i want a little more negative space there we go now yours can look different every everyone is going to look different this is totally up to you but i think i have a nice little forest happening here okay so now it's time to combine all of our little trees here okay so i'm just going to scroll down a little bit okay so now we're just gonna select each of our trees so we're gonna click on one of them here and then hold down shift and we're gonna click on each tree okay and we're going to go up to path and we're going to choose path union so it should combine all of our trees now to make sure we got them all just going to hold those pull that off here yep see how we're not leaving anything behind so we're gonna undo what we just did we're gonna hit command c or control z and it's gonna pop our trees right back where they are all right excellent good job now it's time to cut away the parts of the trees that hang out over the edge of our ornament so to do this we're going to want to be able to clearly see the outer edge of our ornament so let's click on our ornament here and now we're going to just change our fill color on it so let's click it so it's selected change our fill color here and we'll just do a red 255 there we go so now we can see it nice and clear now the tool that we're going to need here is this uh curves and straight lines tool it looks kind of like a pen so we're going to click that and we're just going to click and then we're going to keep clicking all around here kind of the center roughly of our ornament until the trees don't touch it anymore and then we're going to click outside so what we're doing is we are drawing a border here we're drawing a border around our trees to represent the area that we actually want to cut away all right once we join it you see that nice little border here okay and we are going to fill it okay so we're going to fill it it doesn't matter what color we fill it with um and red is fine doesn't matter but we don't want to stroke it so let's click stroke and click the x here and now we have a nice solid shape okay okay so now what we're going to do is we're going to click on our selection tool we're going to select our trees and then we're going to select our funky little shape here and we are going to choose path and difference overhanging spot on the bottom of our ornament that's all gone we're just left with our nice trees and our nice ornaments all right so our ornament is really starting to take shape uh but we need to combine our trees with the rest of our ornament so to do that we're just gonna hit shift and we're gonna make sure that we select both the trees and the ornament here so we're just gonna hit shift and we're gonna select both of these good and then we're gonna go to path and union there we go and now if we change this from a fill to the stroke just like that and we can give it a nice little red color so this is going to be our cut line and we change our stroke style so that it's all one point we can really see a shape that our laser is going to cut looks pretty nice right all right so we will add text and a few other items later but if you're enjoying this video now's only time to pause to like subscribe and ring the bell or share this video with your friends on facebook or other social media accounts it really helps us to get the word out there about all the cool things that the library has to offer and we'd really appreciate it so thanks so our design is looking pretty nice but what do we do if we want to add some text so let's just click on our little text tool here it looks like little a here on the left side and then click anywhere on our design and let's write whatever you want to write so for me i'm going to write all right the christmas ornament i'm going to write chapman christmas 2020. so now what we can do is we can alter this text so we're going to choose here let's choose so you click up here so you can choose whatever kind of script you want whatever you think would look cute for your ornament um let's try a brush script see what a brush script looks like that look cute yeah maybe let's just go with times new roman i actually like that all right so i'm gonna stick with that and let's make it a little smaller here so we can change our font size up here too again at the top so i'm going to change that down to a 16. good okay so it's already starting to take shape right speaking of shape now is the time to curve our text now curving our text is going to be a little hard so what we're going to do is we're going to take we're going to make a brand new circle so we're going to hit our circle tool here we're just going to make a circle just like we did before holding down shift ctrl make a circle all right and let's click our selection tool here and now let's decide how tall or how large we're going to make it we're going to make it the same size as our regular one 3.75 okay and now we're actually going to stroke that with a different color so that we can see it a little easier so let's actually do blue 255 so that should stand out nice right okay so now let's click our ornament in our brand new shape here and let's just center align both of these clicking this vertical and there we go excellent so these are centered on our page so now let's just click on our new line here okay and we're just going to nudge it down until it kind of matches all right good so now holding down shift and control we're going to take our little arrow and we're going to make this a little smaller so it roughly matches the border this interior part here the border of the interior part of our ornament good excellent so now we're going to do with that still selected we're going to hold down shift and we're going to choose our text all right and we're gonna go to text and we're gonna do text put on path all right so now that's on a path it's circular that looks kind of nice but it's sort of upside down we want it to go the other way so to do that we're going to just click on our text and we're going to click on a circle and we're going to click right up here this little arrow flip selected objects horizontally all right okay so now what we're going to do is we're going to just sort of position it a little better so we're going to select our text and we're going to select our circle we're just going to go up here and we're going to go to object and then group so now we can move these objects together so if we double click it so we clicked it once and if we double click it you see these arrows change so now this is going to let us actually rotate it all as one object so we can get this christmas greeting here at the bottom so once we have that roughly where we want it now and click on that and we can ungroup because we don't need that new circle anymore that was just a guide so we're going to go to object ungroup all right and we're going to select our little text here and we're going to go to path and object to path now that's going to kind of finalize where our text is it's going to cement that text in that arc shape okay so now that we have that we're just going to click on our regular circle and we're going to delete it and you can see that our text has retained its shape so now we're going to ctrl a or command a select everything and let's just center it up okay so now what we're going to do is we are going to nudge and when i say nudge i mean you're going to click on it and then use your arrow keys so i'm just going to nudge that down a little bit and i think i'm going to pull it out a little closer to my edges there i think that looks pretty cute actually um let's raise it a little bit and then let's also make it a little taller i think that looks cute okay so now we have our text and we have our ornament so at this point you can be done if you want i want to add a few extra details you can add whatever you want using all the same techniques so for me i want to add a moon so again i'm going to go to file here and then i'm going to import and i'm going to add let's see there's just a little moon there i'm just going to open that moon hit okay there and in this case the moon is an svg file that's a standard vector graphic so i'm just going to make sure it's connected here right up there everything has to be touching your frame okay and now i'm going to make some stars so i'm gonna hit the star key i'm gonna do four corners yeah that looks cute so i'll just do some little four corner stars here adorable all right let's actually fill those instead of stroke all right and then i'm just gonna make a cute little star and then click command d or control d to duplicate and then you can just click them to change them however you want the important part is that they're connected okay so let's just fast forward here through me making a few more stars all right so once that looks the way you want you're just going to select all of these and we're gonna go to path and union so now that's all one path now let's go to our ornament here and let's turn off our stroke and then let's go to fill let's turn it on fill here colors don't matter so we're just gonna select our ornament and we're gonna select our moon and our stars and we're gonna hit path and union so now this is all one object so now what we're going to do we're going to go to fill here we're going to turn off the fill we're going to turn on the stroke now what you're going to want to do is save your work turn on the glow forge and load it with your material now it's time to open up the glowforge app now the way you get to the voteforge app it's actually a web app so it's online so you're going to open up your web browser and you're going to type in app.globeforge.com if you are here at the tech center we will sign you in with our own account here if you do not have a glowforge of your own we will have to put you in with our accounts if you do have a glowforge of your own you should have your own account so we're just going to sign in with our account here everyone's dashboard will look a little different has a lot of different recent projects on it right so i'm going to hit create and we're going to do upload from a file and i'm going to take my ornament svg and i'm just going to click open and you'll see it's processing down here it's going to take a minute to do all the complicated math necessary to render our design and you can see i already put a board here and this board is pre-painted with this little grayish white color so i'm going to take that and i can move my image here and i'm going to just move it over here onto a bit of paint now here where it says unknown i'm going to choose my material type the closest what i'm using is medium basswood plywood so i'm going to select that for my engraving options i'm just going to choose a draft graphic and that is just for the text okay you can see what the settings are going to be here just by clicking the arrow i find that draft graphic works really well for just plain text and then for the cut my boards have been a little warped so i'm actually going to change this i'm going to use this proof grade cut this is what is standard if you're using glowforge's materials however we're not i'm using something different so we're going to have to edit a little bit so i'm actually going to lie here i'm going to tell it that it is 0.1 inches for the focus height that's the only thing i'm going to change that should get me to cut completely through without any problems despite the little bit of warping that i have on the boards okay so once i have that the next step is you're going to hit this more button and you're going to choose set focus that is exactly what you think it's just like setting the focus on your camera we're going to set this on roughly the center of our design here and you can see up here in the corner it's focusing it is thinking about it sometimes this can take quite a while all right and when it's ready you make sure everything still is lining up correctly and it is and you're just gonna hit print and it's gonna calculate the precision movements that are necessary to cut your design and then you're just going to go hit the button on the glowforge machine now it's up to the globe forge to etch score and cut your design and that's it now you have a nice ornament to add to your tree thanks so much for watching and if you have any questions feel free to add them to the comment section below you

Channel: The Lane Libraries

Views: 20,762

Keywords: laser, laser-cut, laser cut, laser cutting, etch, etching, Glowforge, Inkscape, make, maker, tech, technology, DIY, Lane, Tech Center, The Lane Libraries, library, Cincinnati, Hamilton, Ohio, Christmas

Id: qNCxDCvamwg

Length: 31min 4sec (1864 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 18 2020