How to create a negative image to cut from vinyl.

everyone welcome to another installment of Christopher Alan designs today I'm going to be doing a tutorial on the black and white vinyl photos that I have created in design space to cut out a vinyl and actually place on two different materials you may have seen me post them on my facebook page as well as the Cricut design space Facebook page and this is what they look like I did do this one for my sister for an engagement gift and I also did this this town and I also did this one for my anniversary and this is a just a gift bag and today what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be showing you how to actually go ahead and import the graphic getting to show you two different ways I'm going to show you how to do it just basically right in design space and I'm also going to show you how to do it through a program online and what we're going to do is we're going to head over to the computer and I'm going to show you how to do it there and then we're going to go ahead and I'm going to show you how to do all of the weeding and actually apply to the back so see in a minute body 1 and here we are on the computer and I'm going to show you how to go ahead and import those graphics and get them ready to cut out of vinyl so first and foremost what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to open up your Cricut design space and here we are at just a blank canvas this is just the beginning screen now I'm going to show you two different ways to do this the first way is the ability to do it just straight through on the Cricut design space this is a little bit more of a difficult way to do it it's a little bit more advanced and then we also have a online program that is free that you can do it with as well so what we're going to do is we're just going to hit upload image and we're going to do the basic upload and we'll continue to step one just like we've done in the other videos and we want to browse then we want to find our photograph the photograph I'm going to use is of our one dog Brutus and what I generally start with is the moderately complex image and then we're going to continue to step two now once we continue to step two you're going to see here that there's a few different colors here that are coming through what we want to do is you want to click show Advanced Options and you want to reduce the colors you want to start by reducing the colors usually to about four and then you'll see here that it turns into more of a black and white photograph now I can reduce them to two and you'll see that there are even less colors that will be shown here now what I do in this case is I'm going to generally pick out the white areas or the the lightest areas and I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to remove those with this tool right here which is the select and delete tool now again this way is the little bit more of a difficult way to do this process but it is able to be done if you do not like using other programs so you're just going to take out you know as much as you want whatever you think or best to make sure that you have and if you make a mistake there you're just going to hit the back tool whatever you think will make you know that the image stand out the best and then you'll look at the eye and then you'll make sure that you have everything that you like and what you'll do is once you have everything that you think you like you're going to continue to step three and then save image and then you will have the image the way that you like it now the easier way to do this if you do not want to do it this way is you can just click out of here and we're going to start by going to a program called stencil gram it is ww stencil gram calm and this program could not be easier what we'll do is we'll hit the upload an image to begin and we'll take our same image again a Brutus and it will show you very quickly this is what the stencil looks like now in my case I don't think that he is defined enough in this image and that is easy enough to fix so we're going to go down to our balance option and we're going to bring our balance option down now when I bring my balance option down to about I'd say here I think that I get the best view of Brutus so what we do is we push to finalize and once we finalize it it is going to make it very clean which is absolutely great so what you'll do is then you'll hit view and download to full size we're going to give it a right-click we're going to hit save image as and we're going to save this as the Brutus silhouette and I'm not going to save this again because as you can see I already have it saved here so cancel and we will exit out of this web page now again we're going to go into upload image our basic upload continue to step one and for this one we don't have to do any type of a moderately or complex image because this is just a simple image because it's just black and white it's it does have high contrast between the colors so we don't have to worry about any type of color recognition or anything like that so we'll go ahead and we'll continue to step two and then this will bring up the stencil that was created so in this one it's much much easier it's just black and white you're just going to go ahead and you're going to select all of the white areas and usually it's going to keep most of the white areas together so it's not going to be super duper difficult to find those areas that you want to delete again if you make a mistake just hit back and you'll be just fine now you want to make sure that you zoom in here and make sure you get all of these areas that will be a little bit more difficult to see whenever you're taking the areas out of this because they are the smaller areas that are not going to automatically be taken out and by automatically I mean whenever you actually click button the first time or click this select and delete tool button the first time it's going to find all the white areas that are connected and in this image obviously as you can see here there's a lot of not a ton but there are a lot of white areas that are not connected here so what we're going to do is we're going to continue looking around see if we have an areas and this is your opportunity as well to look for some areas that you don't think you necessarily need and I have found while I'm doing this that I do find quite a few areas that do not look like you know something that I need to have in my mice I'm calling this a black and white photograph because it's not necessarily what you would consider a total silhouette because it's it's silhouettes more of a completely darkened or black image that you know you would see a kind of a shadow of something so now we're going to zoom out and what we want to do is you want to make sure that this is exactly what we want now again this this will be a little bit confusing because whenever you see it here it does not look like anything and that is because the image is how do I say this the the image is actually a um it's it's it's it's cut out but you can't really see the contrast of the background color now I cut out the white area for this one but what I'm going to show you is a little bit of a different way of doing it so we're going to go ahead and we're going to back step and we're going to put all of that white area back in because what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to be doing this on a dark gift bag so since I'm doing it on a dark gift bag what I want to do instead is I want to eliminate all of the black so we'll just hit and we'll get rid of all of these black areas and we're going to undo that because we didn't have a little bit messed up and we're going to zoom in we want to get rid of as many of these black areas as we can and what that will leave us with is the white area and what this is going to do is since we're using a dark bag I'm using actually a maybe blue bag because I'm going to be doing another gift bag but this you know it's just something that I think is just super cute to put on a gift bag obviously I'll think it's super cute because you know my dog but I just think that the any dog gift bag and you can see there's you know many out there in the stores any type of a dog get back or petting it back is kind of just a cute little bag to put you know put some gifts and things of that nature um and also give it to you know another dog the neighborhood this one will actually go to my sister's dog with a little gift in it for the new puppy so we'll go ahead and get rid of as much of this black as we can and again you don't have to get every single little piece only because it you are still going to get the impression of what this image is without getting every single little area um you know taken out here I say weed it out even though it's not really weeding because this is you know you're just removing areas on the computer so we'll zoom out and that looks good to me so we'll go ahead and we're going to look at the eye and I like the way that that looks that does certainly look like Brutus to me so we'll go ahead and we'll continue to step three and then we'll just do this as Brutus s and that will be the silhouette for me we can write tags down from the bottom again silhouette things of that nature and we'll save the image now again these tags that I have been using that I've showed in some other videos you want to make sure that you check the size of those before we go ahead and insert this image the the size of my bags again are about roughly I'm using the smaller bags about five inches so that's how big will make this graphic it's a little bit little a little bit bigger than five inches but five inches will fit so from right here we're going to hit upload and we're going to go ahead and make sure grain and grain I've said that in a million of my videos and then we'll head insert images and again do not let this deter you because just because the background is is going to be dark on this does not mean obviously that it's going to be cut out dark it's going to be cut out on a silver vinyl so what we'll do is we'll go ahead and we'll hit our edit button and we're going to change the width the width we want at five inches and then this will make us this will make this six inches tall so the six inches tall that's perfect I'm looking it you know the the measurement on my bag and then we will go ahead and hit go now the next thing that you're going to seem to do is go ahead and apply this vinyl to the bag you have seen me apply vinyl quite a few times but I think it is important to show you the weeding process and show you how to go ahead and put that on here so we're going to hit go we're going to go ahead and cut it on the machine and we'll be right back okay everyone we are now here at my workstation and what we first want to do is we want to go ahead and we want to weed out this area because we are going to be putting it on this bag as you can see there's a little bit of damage to the top of this bag but that is fine because I'm going to go ahead and put a little bit of ribbon and or washi tape at the top here so what we want to do is we want to first go ahead and take a look at our image again I know there's still all of this on this mat but this is the mat that I use generally specifically for my bag making now what we'll do is we'll go ahead and we'll start weeding out our image and what I like the best about when you're creating one of these in the design space or whatever it's you know you're bringing this this image in is that the the the program actually automatically will attempt to cut this out exactly how it is shown and what I mean by that is you'll see as I'm pulling this up I really like the the kind of jagged lines that you that you get so it really does look like it's more of a painting you know that that you are placing onto the bag rather than um you know the the actual vinyl works so what you always want to do and what I you know always say is you want to pull this up to you whenever you're waiting so you can see the exact areas that need to come out from your image and you don't want to pull out any areas you know that are not that we're not supposed to be removed and I have done that a million times no matter how many times I do this weeding I always somehow will manage to pull out something that was not supposed to be pulled out or I'll pull out an extra piece and I'll be trying to put things back in so no matter how many times you do this you will always you know find something new or a newer technique once you're doing it and you just want to kind of you know go ahead and make sure that you're getting all of the areas out that you know you wanna make sure that everything is where it is supposed to be when you're waiting this out so that looks good to me um this is you know again it's going to be a little bit different looking than the ones that I've done that I posted before because I'm doing this as an opposite for this bag so now what we'll do is we'll use my favorite material which is that magic lever that I get from the dollar the Dollar Tree and we're going to go ahead and we're going to cut this out at the level that we needed to be cut out at and just very quickly touch through this now again with this project I have I have tried this now since it's it's kind of conception of figuring out how to do it last evening I've done this on so many different things I did it on you know that that canvas board that I had shown you I have done it on I actually did a small version on a cup I've done think about the gift bags I did a decal today for one of my coworkers arms actually put on her computer so I mean there there are you know a million and ten different things that you can do with this process and again I did see someone just this evening actually posted on some coasters that she did and I thought that was really really neat so it just depends on what you know you want to do now this image again like I said is going to be a little bit different from the ones that you had seen earlier because those ones it wasn't what what I would call this is like a relief whereas you know the other ones it was the the complete area was being was being kind of cut out from the background so it's really going to just depend on you know what you prefer with this one I wanted to try out kind of a little bit of a different technique because I'm using a darker bag if you don't like this technique you know you can absolutely do it you know the the other way just by leaving all of these the white area to be cut out and it's again completely up to personal preference whatever whatever you like um you know we can do here so we're going to go ahead we're going to get rid of our map which this end over here and we're going to grab our bag and now what I'll do is I'm going to just go ahead and place this wherever I think is best and now once we place this you're actually going to be able to see what I was talking about with actually being able to see the image I know you whenever you first saw the image I you know would have been the same way and would think oh my goodness what that's not going to look like anything so you need to kind of see the finished product with these because it is you know it does not look necessarily the exact way that it's going to look once everything is applied once you first you know start doing the leading and pulling on especially if it's a white background you know on with up with a lighter vinyl so you need to the finished product is what is going to is what's going to show you exactly you know the full image or as you'll be able to see that before so here we go I'm going to go ahead and throw that away and now you can see you can absolutely see Brutus in that photo again this is something that I might clean up a little bit more um I might have ad added another layer of another layer of vinyl to do more around his ears but this is just the basic premise that we're going over in this video um and at the top of this I may do something very quickly with some washi tape just to hide you know that booboo that we have there and um just very quickly we would go ahead and cut this off and then you can see here that that blue blue is fixed and I might add you know some some glitter up here at the top I might add another element of ribbon in the middle but this is our basic bag and again to review we have this bag I also did this for my sister and future brother-in-law and I did this bag for mine and ROMs anniversary so I hope this helps and go ahead and if you you know like this video go ahead and give me a thumbs up it does help move things up on YouTube and also make sure that you subscribe we are getting very close to the 500 subscriber level and once we get there I have a huge giveaway to go ahead and share with you guys so I hope you like this video if you have any other questions please do not hesitate to send me a message on our Facebook or go ahead and send me a message on YouTube I thank you so much and you have a wonderful evening bye bye

Channel: Christopher Alan Design

Views: 400,802

Rating: 4.9239826 out of 5

Keywords: cricut, explore, vinyl, negative, stencil

Id: 15vCgfg39rE

Length: 19min 27sec (1167 seconds)

Published: Thu May 29 2014