Hi, this
is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to show you how to cut a contour
die cut line for a sticker in Adobe Illustrator. And this would be good if you're wanting to
cut out stickers on your Cricut, or Cameo machine or any die cutting machine. Alright, let's
get started. Alright, so I'm going to create a new document. And I'll just come up here to Print and choose
Letter. And we'll Create. Now I've got a design already saved. And I'm just going to paste it in. And this is something that I want to add a
contour die cut line to. So if your design has a lot of effects and
strokes, you'll need to expand all this. So hit CTRL Y or CMD Y on a Mac. And as you can see the all those leaves are
actually a brush that's going along this path. And this B is not expanded, etc. So let's hit CMD Y and CTRL Y to go back. It's okay to leave all of these things as
is, but my die cut line needs to be completely expanded. So first, I'm going to group this with CMD
G, then I am going to copy and hide it with CMD 3 or CTRL 3 on a PC. Then I'll paste in front, that's CMD F or
CTRL F on a PC. And now I've got one right on top of the other
one, and one is hidden, and one is showing. So now I'm going to expand this as far as
it will go. And to do that, I'm going to come up here
to Object > Expand Appearance. Now you can see that our little leaves have
become expanded, they all have points and paths. Now, I'm going to come up and do it again. But this time, I'll choose Expand. And we'll expand all three of these. And I'll say OK. And if we zoom in, you can see that the line
doesn't go all the way out to the edge of the B, so I need to do some more expanding,
we'll come up here to Object > Expand, and choose Fill & Stroke and say, OK. All right, now it looks like every piece of
this is expanded as far out as it'll go, meaning it goes all the way to the edges of what you
see. So I'm going to come over here to Pathfinder,
and then just do the first Shape Mode which is Unite. Okay, and it's going to change the color,
and that is just fine. So now I'm going to get my Appearance open. Now, if you don't have your Appearance open
or any of these other palettes, you can come up here to Window, and you can find them all
in here. Okay, so we have a group right now. And if we double click our contents, we can
see a fill, and then a stroke up here. Now I want the stroke to be underneath everything
so I can see how far away it is from our purple stuff. So I'm going to grab that stroke out here
and just drag it behind the fill. So now we have the fill on top and the stroke
underneath. Now I'm going to click on that stroke, come
over here and double click it. And I'm going to just make it any color that's
easy to see. I'll say OK. And you can see it added a little thin, a
little thin outline to it. Okay, so we've got 1 pt right now and I need
to bump this way up. We need to make sure that the outer things
at least are touching, and they are right now. So I think this is good. Let's go to Stroke. And we'll round this outline, we'll round
the cap and the corner. Alright, and the reason these things look
like this is because they're not a compound path, but it doesn't really matter at this
point, because we are going to expand it all again. Let's go to Object > Expand Appearance, and
then we'll go to Object > Expand. And we'll expand everything that we can. I'll say OK. Now you can see we have all of these tons
of shapes. So let's go over here to Pathfinder and Unite
these. Alright, now we have our die cut line. But we also have some stuff in the middle
that we don't want. So I'm going to get my Group Selection tool
which is right under here, and I'm going to hold SHIFT and deselect the outermost outline. So now I only have the stuff inside selected,
and I can just delete it. Now I'll click on this and hit D on my keyboard
which gives me a white fill and a black outline. Okay, so our die cut line is created now. So let's bring back everything else that's
inside the sticker. We'll go to Object > Show all. Okay, it's actually there but it is behind
the die cut. So let's bring it to the front. We'll SHIFT CMD ] or SHIFT CTRL ] on a PC. Alright, and that is the process. Now I'm going to try it with a design I found
on Vecteezy. So let's go out there and get the design. It's this one right here Caticorn. Now whenever you use Vecteezy graphics, you
really need to read the license because there are lots of things you cannot do. You also have to credit the author, a lot
of different things like that. So be sure to read the license. This one says attribution required. Okay, so we'll download this, we'll choose
free license. All right now this is coming in as a zip file. So I'm going to double click it. If you're on a PC, you can right click and
Extract all. Okay, and we've got an SVG file right here,
we've also got an EPS and an Illustrator file. So open the Illustrator file. So I just want the Caticorn text and maybe
this shadow, but none of this other stuff. So I'll hit G to get to my Group Selection
too. That might be set up to your Gradient Tool,
but just know that it's right under here. Now I'm going to hit CMD Y, or CTRL Y on a
PC. That'll allow me to see the parts that I want
a little easier. I've got my Group Selection tool right up
here. I'm just going to draw a box around the things
I definitely want and hide them with CMD 3, then I'll also use that same tool to select
everything else and delete it. And then I'll unhide –OPTION CMD 3 or ALT
CTRL 3 on a PC. Okay, and then I can just kind of go through
here, hold SHIFT and select the things that are left over, get rid of that. I do want this word, I'm going to move it
up a little bit, and I'll change it to black. And then I'm going to grab that background
and delete. Okay, we've got everything that I want. For the sticker, I see some extra things that
I don't want. Okay, I think I'm just going to delete this
too. I'm going to copy this and paste behind, then
I'll hide it with CMD 3. So the one that's behind there is now hidden. Now I can make my contour line out of this. But if you hit CMD Y, you'll notice that we
have a weird rainbow thing going on here. And that is going to be a problem, we have
to get rid of that. So hit CMD Y or CTRL Y again to get back. There's also a little weird dot here that
I miss, I'm going to delete that with my Group Selection tool. I'm going to click right in that rainbow area,
and then click again to select the group inside there. And I'm just going to delete those, this is
just going to form the die cut line. So it doesn't really need to be there. Okay, we've got everything selected. And now I'm just going to hit SHIFT CMD o
to outline our text, that's SHIFT CTRL o on a PC. And then I am going to make sure everything
is expanded out. So we can do that with expand. And we don't even get any options. So it's ready to go. All right. Let's make sure we've got the whole thing. And then we'll come over here to the Pathfinder
and unite them. All right, now let's go to Appearance. I'm going to double click on contents. And then I'll pull the stroke behind the fill
like we did before. And now I am going to make that fill maybe
a yellow color this time. And we will increase the size until those
things down here are overlapping. We'll come up here to the stroke. And I'm just going to round both things like
this. And now it is time to expand again, Object
> Expand Appearance, and then Object > Expand. And we'll expand the fill and stroke and say
OK. All right. Now we'll come to Pathfinder and Unite. We've got a few little pieces in here. So let's get on our Group Selection, hold
SHIFT, deselect the outer area and then delete. Now I'm going to get back on this and then
just hit D on my keyboard to get a white fill and black outline. I'll go ahead and bump this up to two or three,
maybe. And send to back: SHIFT CMD [. Okay, so now
when I unhide my original thing, it should be right exactly in the right place. We'll go to Object > Show all. All right, and there is our cut line for our
Caticorn. So now we've got a cut line that you can use
with Cricut, or hand off to a company that specializes in die cut stickers. Alright, if you liked this video and you want
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