How to add shadow to an image in Cricut Design Space

hey guys crystal here at crystals craft ease today I want to show you how to add shadow to an image in Cricut design space so we all know that Cricut design space within itself does not have a shadow feature so you're gonna have to use an outside source my favorite source is Inkscape Inkscape is so amazing there is just so much that you can do with it and it's free I use it for all of my SVG's and a whole bunch of other design stuff but today I'm just going to show you how to use the shadow feature okay so you're going to need to go to Inkscape org or come up to your google search and just type in Inkscape and you're going to get it it's this one right here so just click Inkscape then click on this download over here and it's going to give you some download options you just choose whatever is best for you and download that on to your computer I'm again it's totally free so it's really awesome okay I've already got it downloaded so I'm gonna not do that right now okay so for this one I want to show you how to pull the image right out of design space and put it into Inkscape there's several different ways to upload images but for this one I'm going to show you how to do it this way so you're going to want your snipping tool I have mine save to my taskbar if you don't know where your snipping tool is you've never heard of it um your computer has it well your your windows your PC has it I don't know that Mac has a snipping tool come over to your little search over here and type snip and it's going to pull up sniffing cool to get a new image saved you just want to click new and then drag around the image that you want file save as name that whatever you want to name it I've actually already saved this exact image as America Tim hi desktop so I'm not going to say but again I when you're doing this you need to turn your grids off if you have these grids it's going to be a lot harder to work with your image so just click up here once to turn off the little grids two times turn off the inch and then you have a plain white background and you can save your image okay once you've got the image saved to your desktop you can come in and just drag the image right into Inkscape and it will open this little box for you click OK all of that is fine and then expand to make it bigger if you don't want to drag it in like that you can always double click the Inkscape icon on your desktop come to file import and it'll pull up all your pictures and you can just pick there it is right there it could open it that way too okay so a couple things to go over here in Inkscape I'm going to move this off to the side this square is your project anything outside of this square will not save when you save your project so if I were to click save right now it would be blank even though this is here it would be a blank picture because only the things within this square are gonna save can we put my picture back over I want to make it a little bit bigger because it's just kind of hard to see so this is one of the simplest commands in Inkscape just use the plus sign on your keyboard to make it bigger use the minus sign to make it smaller okay and then also I want to make this image just a little bit smaller than my save box so I'm gonna hit I'm gonna select the image first of all just click it to select it and grab your arrows and drag them in make sure you hit control if you do not hit control you're gonna get all out of proportion here so let me undo that okay so I'm going to hit control and drag my image to make it just a little bit smaller that way I'm working within my box okay so the first thing we need to do here select the image come up to path and go to trace bitmap okay there's a whole bunch of stuff over here you don't need to mess with it you don't need to worry about any of it the only thing you need to make sure you do is turn this smooth off and turn this remove background on remember when we save this picture there was this white background all around it we don't want that so turn the background off click this update you should see what you've got that's perfect click OK then I can close this box out now you're gonna see there's my bitmap that I traced here's my original design I'm gonna pull so I don't even need that I'm gonna delete my original design ok so here's my new bitmap you can see the background is gone you can see the you know space here so that white background has been deleted and that's exactly what we need for what we're doing here ok now you want to select your image again you want to come up to path and you want to go to linked offset okay now it's gonna pull up this little diamond a lot of people drag their diamond to do their offset I don't like to do that it just gets all wonky for me for some reason okay when I've got this kind of a cursor this skinny arrow I know that I am in my notes I'm in my offset I'm gonna come down here I'm gonna change the color you can see now any offset I do offset is also just the word for shadow is gonna be red okay I'm going to use my quick commands on my keyboard I'm going to hit ctrl right parenthesis and you can see that red getting bigger and bigger by my black so there is my shadow that is exactly what I wanted I can take this black part and move it off to the side okay I've got some little holes in here that I need to fill there's a couple different ways I can fill this I can double click in here and you see my cursor changed to the skinny arrow again and you can see all these nodes each of these little nodes is what tells your cricut to cut its gonna cut here here here here here here it's gonna cut all these little nodes and that really really bugs down your machine and it it just takes a lot of time and it where's your machine out so we want to get rid of these nodes there's a couple different ways I can do it I can select those are all selected hit backspace delete they're all gone now these are still here and I do also want to get rid of all this white space in here so let me show you the easy way to come in and just fill in all of this stuff okay I want to come up to path and then I'm going to scroll down to break apart now do you see it filled all of that in but it also separated this into two different parts it broke apart all of this stuff and if I think I'm done it's going to be a huge mess before you do anything else after you break apart just come right back to path and go to Union now they're all gone now we only have our outside nodes and this is perfect for cricket in fact this is just a couple little nodes crickets gonna love that so there is your shadow you can test it out you can pull your other guy up here make sure that it is the size that you need that one looks good so we don't need this guy anymore our shadow is the only thing that we want it is within our box so file save as and I'm going to name it merica shadow and you can save it as an Inkscape SVG okay then we can close that out you can come back to cricut upload upload image let's go find that SVG that we just created believe we named it America shadow here it is now you can't really see it because it's this SPG now you actually saved an SVG file to your computer there it is save select insert the image okay let's lower that to the bottom put this on top size it however we want it voila all done so that's how to get a shadow behind an image I've also done a video on how to add shadow to text but I used an app a smartphone app to do that I want to show you how to do that in Inkscape really quick because that's also pretty cool so I'm going to go open my Inkscape just double click there okay I'm gonna make it a little bit bigger I just like to see what I'm working with hey you want to come over here to your menu bar and select this text option and it's gonna pull up some text here and just type hold on sorry I don't know what was going on there so I've got my name okay you want to highlight it make sure it's all highlighted and then come and change to whatever font you want to use I'm gonna come here and use this font okay so that's pretty small to begin with I'm gonna select my selector tool up here so I can make this bigger again hold your control to make it bigger so that you don't change the scale of your word and make it all wonky okay this is an awesome font but it's also really skinny if I were going to put this into Cricut it would not cut well so there's a few things I'm gonna want to do first of all let me show you it looks like it's all connected like if we were to go into Cricut it looks like it's welded but it is not and I'll show you how you can see that if you come up here you display mode outlined oh sorry I need to turn this to a path first Inkscape works with paths right now it's just a word I came up selected path object to path okay now you can see all these little lines you know cricket would cut right through this my see will cut into my are my s would cut into my tea and all this would be a big ole miss so we need to basically weld it like we would if we were in design space the way we want to do that we want to edit select all it's not doing it for me each one of these you can see they're all different here I need all of this to be selected so hold on yeah it's not giving all of it to me there we go there now all of it is selected I've got all of this down here all of this up here every item is selected and we are going to come to object I'm sorry to path Union Union is the same as a weld in design space so now you can see all of my cuts it's just one big solid welded word now so I'm going to turn this view back to normal okay now this is like we said it's pretty skinny so I need to thicken it I want to show you how to do that but I'm going to have to backtrack a little bit to get there so select your word you're gonna come up to path you're gonna do linked offset just like we did before control right parenthesis okay that's terrible we don't want to cut that so here's where I'm going to backtrack here's what we need to do first of all edit I'm gonna undo that okay I'm gonna make this hold on I'm gonna make my page really really small but I'm going to take my word and make it really big okay so now you can see my save area is pretty small but this word is huge and the reason I've done it this way is when I take such a big object and I do the offset it doesn't go so much at one time so I'm going to select it path linked offset control right parenthesis now just getting a little tiny bit bigger might not even be very noticeable but I promise you it did get a little bit bigger I did the linked offset twice on this one and you can see it all there like if I I've got two of them this top one is the original you can see it's a little bit thinner like look at this s this bottom one is where I did the offset obviously I don't want the top one anymore I'm gonna get rid of it this one is now the one I want to save I'm going to shrink it back down to my page use the plus sign to make my page bigger shrink my word and just keep playing with it I'll get it back on the page where I want it okay now it's on the page where I want it that thickened got my font so that it is thick enough for my Cricut to cut it and now I'm gonna fit the shadow behind it the exact same way we've been doing linked offset but to show you the difference here I'm gonna turn my name and turn it this pretty blue color here okay so path linked offset control I'm gonna turn my offset maybe great there it is there's my shadow behind my name I'm gonna move that to the side we want to get rid of all this space in between again so what do we do double click so we can see these nodes path break apart where is my break apart there you are and path Union okay there you have it and then you can just use your little arrows to position that however you want it there is the shadow behind your word there might be okay sometimes there's a little extra piece in here but no this one was good now I do want to say both of these because I want them both to come up in my design space so I put one on top of the other file save as name shadow name scape SVG save we're gonna be done with that go back into my design space now I'm gonna upload the thing I just saved here where did it go there it is okay it's an SVG so I just say that like it is select it insert the image shrink these guys down over here there it is and it is already grouped together but they are two separate images I can ungroup this and move my name off and move the shadow around so it's that easy guys that's all there is to it if you have any questions let me know thanks

Channel: Crystal's Crafties

Views: 91,127

Keywords: Shadow in Design Space, Text shadow in Cricut, adding shadow to images in cricut design space, offset in inkscape, inkscape shadow tutorial, how to add shadow in cricut, how to make an outline in design space

Id: TYWgAigCPSY

Length: 17min 27sec (1047 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 20 2019