How to use Inkscape to make a file to cut your own custom stencils.

hi this is becky from chic molding and i'm going to show you how to use inkscape to create a digital file that you can use on your home cutter machine or you can send them to a commercial cutter to be laser cut cnc cut or cut with a blade or as i say you can use your home qriket machine and it'll work with any of the tools on there firstly let's figure out what kind of an image is going to be suitable to convert here i've got two images on the screen here they're both of the same butterfly but i've added a few colors to one just to show you the difference the top one here has nice clean lines it's pretty easy to see the definition between the two colors here there's a lot of gradients going on it's a bit ugly really isn't it but it's perfect for demonstrating i've gone ahead and traced these already so let's just move these over and show you the difference this top one traced pretty nicely that's that's it there's a few little things to sort out but that's all right not too much to do there the bottom one this is two different settings that i've done using the trace and both of them are pretty enough this one on the left is actually the better one it's more workable than the right one there's a heck of a lot of editing to do on that right one to make it anything near the trace result that we got from the simpler image so another thing i want to talk about is the difference between a vector and a raster file a raster you've probably heard of files such as jpegs or tiffs these are both raster files and they are made up of lots and lots and lots of little docs that you've probably heard of called pixels let's just pop to photoshop here and i'll just show you what happens when you zoom in on pixels so the more i zoom in the more fuzzy the edges get and you can actually see the pixels here's one here's one here's one all these little squares are pixels so if we pop back to our inkscape view here if i zoom in on let me just go to these so here we go here we have a raster at the top and a vector at the bottom the more you zoom in on the rest of the more blurry it gets the more i zoom in on the vector look at those lovely clean sharp edges and the more i increase the size of these let's have a look and show you now you could probably see that one got fuzzier as it got bigger this one still has lovely clean edges so vectors are much more scalable than rasters they're also a much smaller file size so how do these files work they're actually made up of as you can see here each one of these dotted lines forms a square around a shape let me just select one of them for you so you can see what i mean that's a shape on its own and what they're actually made up of is lots of little nodes here or points depending on where you learned about these things and these nodes are controlled by handles and also settings you can set them to be corners or you can set them to be bezier curves we'll learn more about that later on i've got a new document open here in inkscape i'll put a link down below to show you where you can download it for yourself i'm going to open up the image that i want to trace to a vector so i'll go to file open and then find my image you can download this image for yourself on the sheet moldings website i've written a blog to accompany this tutorial so if it's going too fast for you at all you can always go there and check out the written version so here we've got a dialog box i'm going to go ahead and click ok and here's the butterfly before we start let me introduce you to the inkscape window here we've got tools on the left hand side here click on them if you click on them you'll see this tool control bar here changing and all of the governs here is related to the tool that you've clicked on there's also menus up across the top here i won't worry too much about the colors at the bottom and anything here on the right for the purpose of this tutorial if you mouse over a tool you'll see a little note come up which shows you the description of what the tool does and also a letter that letter is a keyboard shortcut so for this select tool you can click on s watch my cursor if i click on r which is the rectangle tool my cursor changes to a rectangle e is for the ellipse tool changes to an ellipse and so on i'm going to click on the select tool and then click once on the image you can see if an image is selected because it'll have this dotted box around it and you'll also see these little arrows i'll go more into these little arrows a bit later on to trace this from this raster to a vector i'm going to go to the path menu and then go to trace bitmap which opens up this tab over here you can play with these options if you like but to keep this simple i'm just going to click apply and then i'm going to close down this tab now it doesn't look like an awful lot has happened does it but i know that the raster is behind the vector here so i just need to get rid of the raster if i click between this dotted line and the edge of the butterfly and then drag you can see that the raster image has now been separated and i can delete that by hitting delete on my keyboard or i can right click and go to delete let's save this file before we go any further we go to file save as and just save it as you would any other type of file we want to save it as an svg i'm going to call it butterfly stencil dot svg and then save i like to work on an image with outlines rather than fills so i'm going to show you how i change that if i click on the image and then go to objects fill in stroke it'll open up this tab within this tab you've got three more tabs fill stroke paint and stroke style you can play around with these colors you've got different color systems here and you can enter color values here if you're making logos and that sort of thing but we don't need particular colors for the purpose of this stencil tutorial i want to get rid of the fill so i'll click on the x then i'll click on the stroke paint tab to give it a stroke color and i just want to give it a flat color here you can also find gradients and that sort of thing here i encourage you to play around then i'll click on stroke style i want to use millimeters so i'll change this value to millimeters and then i want to the width to be 0.1 then i'll hit enter and i'll close down this tab and now i'll go ctrl s which is a shortcut for save and it's good to get into the habit of doing that now at the moment we have several objects here which are all nested together to make this image i want to separate them out so i've got this selectors as you can see and then i'll go to path break apart and as you can see now each individual object has a selection box around it and they're all individual there's several things i want to do to improve this image i want to make the antennae a bit straighter i want to get rid of this little blob here i want to separate out some of these objects so that the butterflies veins show up better i want to improve the layout of some of these blobs over here and i want to smooth off the edges to do that i'm actually only going to edit one side and i'll flip it over later on so firstly let's get rid of this blob i'm just going to click on it with the select tool that we've met before and hit delete on my keyboard and i'm going to control s again to save it the next stage involves some drawing so i'm going to introduce you to some of the drawing tools along the left hand side here so to use the rectangle tool click on it and then you just click and drag to draw a square or a rectangle up here you have got in your tool property bar you can change the width and the height and you can also change the measurements i'm not going to go through everything on the toolbars here i'm just going to go through what's relevant for this tutorial for the ellipse tool you can click and drag and again you can change the size here and the unit of measurement for the star tool you have options up here you can choose polygon or star you can draw a star and then change the number of spikes and also how skinny or chunky a star is you can go to the polygon tool and again you can this is a way to draw triangles quickly you get the idea i'm going to skip these two and get rid of these you can click and draw a rectangle around shapes to select them all together and then i'll delete those so the pen tool here this is the way that you will draw your points so if you select the pen tool you've got some different options up here i again highly encourage you to play around with these because they're a lot of fun but for now i'm going to use the regular bezier path tool so i'll click and then move to another point where i want the next note and then click again that's to do a straight line and a corner and then if i want to draw a curve instead of just clicking and then clicking again i will click and drag before i let go and you'll see this handle come out there click and drag let go click and drag let go and then to close a path you just click on the first point let's delete that now we'll go to the pencil tool which is a way to draw freehand so i'm just going to click and hold while i move the cursor around to create my shape and again i can go back to the start and close that path and let's delete that and the final one i'm going to show you is a text tool so you can pick your your font here you can make it but that would be bold or regular if i have that option with this font you can change the size so let's click type some text into there and if you have a look here again let's go back to the text tool change the font you can see what's going on here okay so now we know how to do some basic drawing i'm going to draw this little shape here to split these two apart i'm going to use the pen tool i'm going to click and just make a useful shape and then close that off so you see i've got another closed shape there with that shape selected i'm going to hold down shift and then click on the shape that i want to split that means i now have two selected so remember to hold down shift if you want to add to the selection and now i'm going to go to path division you can now see i've got three selection boxes here one two three let's deselect those by clicking anywhere off them and now let's click on the little shape i drew to get rid of it by hitting delete so now we have a nice clean shape now we're going to look at how to tidy up an edge so first we're going to use a new tool we haven't looked at yet this is the edit path by node tool so click on that and now i'm going to click on the edge now you'll see these little nodes come up that you saw earlier if i hold the cursor over the node that i want to select it'll turn red and then i can click on it and it's selected and you can see there's these two handles either side so if i grab a handle and i know that it's the right handle i wanted to get because it's turned red i can change the form of this curve zoom out a little bit here i can also let's do the one next to it a little bit i can also if we zoom in here on this one that's a little bit spiky that's because it's a different sort of node it's not a bezier curve node it's a corner node so if i click on it and then go up here i've got an option to change that type of node so i'm going to click on the smooth node and you'll see now it's got its handles and it's smoothed off all on its own i can improve that a little bit if i want to delete a node to get rid of it completely i'll just click on it to select it and then hit delete on the keyboard i like to minimize the number of nodes that i have around a path i just find it cleaner to work with and if i need to do any editing later on that's helpful then as well i'll show you one more thing before i go ahead and edit this if i zoom on an object here and click on it you will see these little arrows that i talked about earlier when these arrows are pointing out i can grab them click and hold and drag to increase the size of the image now at the moment i'm just clicking and dragging with the mouse if i hold down control then i can resize it with the ratio of height to width staying the same if i click on it again you'll see the arrows change and they point around the object in this case i can click and drag to rotate the object so now i'm going to go ahead and do the rest of those edits that i talked about i've sped this up so i'm not really this quick you don't have to be this quick either i've just adjusted the antenna here and the head i'll be flipping this over so i'm only editing one side i'm clicking on the nodes and then either moving them over you can see they're red when they're active and then you can grab the handles either side and just use those to change the shape of the edge of your component now here you see a whole load of nodes i'm clicking on them and deleting them click hit delete click hit delete and nothing seems to be happening i think this might have happened when i divided the two images in step 10. it seems that what's happened is when it was divided there's a whole load of the two shapes on top of each other or a whole load of points on top of each other so i'm just keep on deleting until i get a couple of nodes left where i want them i don't like loads of nodes around the edges of my shapes i like clean edges it makes them much easier to edit later on so here i'm just changing the blobs making them all a little bit better positioned i'm changing corner nodes to curves to make it a bit smoother as per step 11 if you're watching this as part of the blog tutorial and if you're not watching this as part of the blog tutorial i will put a link to the blog tutorial below as it has written instructions about this video [Music] whoa what's going on with this one that's a little bit random isn't it look i'm quite new to inkscape i'm used to using adobe illustrator which has a slightly different set of commands and it's just a new way of of doing it for me i'm relatively familiar with how to do things i just have to sometimes uh tweak what i'm used to doing for inkscape yeah i get it wrong sometimes no harm doing that when you're learning a new program the more you get wrong the more you learn you have an undo button don't stress out just play with the program keep going with it and i promise you that you will pick it up so fast i'm just going around refining everything here [Music] now i've edited this butterfly to my liking i need to copy this side which i have edited over to the other side now at the moment the outline here is all one piece so i need to split it in half in order to flip it over to do that i'll make sure it's all ungrouped which it is and then i will go to my pen tool i'll make a vertical line by clicking and then clicking again holding down the control key at the same time now look at the difference if i'm not holding the control key down i can pick any angle if i'm holding down the control key i get increments so i want a vertical line so i'm going to click again and then hit enter so i've got my line now what i'll do is i'll go to the selection tool i've already got that line selected i'll then click on the outline as well while holding down the shift key and then go path division now i've got two sides so i'm going to click off to deselect and then click on the right hand side to select it and hit delete on my keypad and now i'm going to click and drag a square around all those other elements and again delete it so to copy and flip this over i'm going to click and drag to select it all to make it a bit easier to handle i'm going to go to object group so we're grouped again and now i'm going to copy and paste it there's several ways you can do this you can go to edit copy and then edit paste or as you'll see here you can do control c and ctrl v so there's my duplicate copy now i want to flip this over there's several ways to do that you see up here on the selection tool control panel we've got some buttons here this one is flip horizontally if you go to the object menu you'll also find that option there and you'll notice as well that the keypad shortcut is an h so let's go ahead and hit h and that is now flipped i want to drag this over so that it matches up it actually is a very good program for jumping to where you want it to be sometimes it can be too good but if you ever have any problems positioning everything with the mouse you can always use your arrow keys on the keypad like i'm doing now but for now that's in the correct position i want now to merge the background so i'm going to click on both of these groups go to object ungroup then i'm going to deselect it by clicking on the artboard and then i'm going to click hold down shift and click again on the two outlines go to path union and there we now have our union the reason we want to do that is we don't want to have a line down the middle in fact it would have been two lines because one was on top of the other when the cutter tried to cut that you would have ended up with a line down the middle of your stencil sometimes that doesn't really matter it depends how you're laying out your stencil it actually wouldn't have mattered for my purposes but i prefer a clean image as we all know by now so now we have an image that's ready to go i am going to control s to save it again so now this is a file that you can send to a cutter as it is but there's a couple more things that i want to do to it depending on the size of the stencil and the panel that is going on i often will use the edges of my stencil to align it to the panel my panel size is 120 mil wide by 140mm high so i'm going to go ahead and click on the rectangle tool draw a rectangle change the units to millimeters and then i'm going to set the width by keying it in on my keypad so there's my panel there i want to send it behind this image because i want the butterfly to be on top so i can see it all together so i can go to object lower to bottom you can also raise to top or just ways at one layer depending on how many objects you've got on top of each other now i'll just draw a rectangle around the butterfly and go object group and i will drag that over using the little arrows that we saw before i'm going to hold down the ctrl key and make that butterfly a bit bigger i'm going to click again and rotate it this butterfly is fairly centrally aligned on this panel but if i wanted to make sure that it was perfectly central i would go to object align and distribute which brings up this tab there's a few things you can do here obviously here you've got your your left line central align right line etc i won't go into too much of this now but there's a couple of ways i can do this here i just grab all this and move it down under the page the pages in the background here you can set this up in document properties which is here there's all sorts of bits you can do here set your display units set your page size you can set it custom here you can do portrait landscape i won't go into that anymore now but if i want to set this to the middle of this page i will select both of these images which are both selected at the moment and make sure it's relative to page and then click on the centrally aligned one just get rid of this little bit of gubbins here that i had from working out the tutorial earlier and the other way is i'll just just drag this over to demonstrate the second way so i'll just select those both and you can go to instead of page you can use selection area and the selection area is the area in which these two pieces are because those are the pieces selected and then again i'm going to click on center on vertical axis and also center on horizontal axis so you can see that that butterfly is now perfectly aligned in the middle and let's go ctrl s again to save the project and we're done i hope you found this tutorial interesting and that it's helpful for you with your projects at home there's more information about this tutorial on the sheet moldings website in the blog area i'll put a link down below i include materials that you can use to make stencils with and also other ways in which you can use your svg files that you create in inkscape bye for now

Channel: Chic Mouldings

Views: 145

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Id: Zekw6UUJy9I

Length: 25min 31sec (1531 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 20 2021