Making a Layered Mandala using Silhouette Studio and Glowforge

in this tutorial I'm going to show you how to make a layered mandala file in your silhouette studio Business Edition to cut out on your glowforge the suggestion came to me from Terry Keller in micro hoarders using silhouette studio Facebook group if you're not a member there yet check it out for more tips and tricks let's get started first thing I did was go to google and search for free simple mandala I searched the images until I found one that I liked and I knew I didn't want one too complex because of how the layering works I didn't want to lose any tiny details so I found this one and I followed it to the website and the website did indicate that it was free for personal use if you're planning on doing this to sell it make sure you have the right licenses to do that here I'm going to make a snip of it because I'm using a Windows computer you can use a grab if you're using a Mac now it's made a copy and put it on my clipboard so I'm just gonna head back over to silhouette studio and paste it into a new tab of my design space I'm gonna zoom in a little bit to get a closer look of what we're doing here so now what you want to do is trace by clicking this butterfly looking icon over here and we'll select trace area and draw a box around our image and if you don't get it around perfectly you can always adjust it still so up here you can see that there's still some black showing through not everything is yellow so I'm going to adjust the threshold until I get nice bold yellow lines then come down here and click the trace button but now that's created our cut lines for us and we can just click on the original and delete it and I'm going to zoom out a little bit so we have some more space to work now the next step is to resize your mandala whatever you're gonna want your final project sides to be I wanted mine to be about four and a half because I was testing this out and I wanted all of the layers to fit on one sheet of wood next I'm going to create a copy of it I just did ctrl-c and ctrl-v for copy and paste and I'm going to set this one off to the side you want to go back to this one over here and right click and push release compound path now it's gonna separate all your pieces of the mandala out and what you want to do is try to select and drag away the outermost line which is the outline that goes around the whole mandala so if you mess up and you accidentally pull out a piece instead of the outermost just push control Z to undo on your keyboard and then try again to drag away that outermost and you can also zoom in to help you be more accurate on that so when you successfully do that select everything right click and make a compound path again this is what you're going to be doing all of your in sets based off of let's go to the right-hand panel click on the star to get to your offset panel and we're going to do internal offset now the distance is really going to be based off of your particular project but you can see a preview of what that inset is going to look like over here on your work piece I like to start off using the down arrow to get the closest relationship to my original design that I can cut so I'm gonna push this down until the lines get closer and closer to my original design so that I know that that's the smallest inset that I want to use for this project also real quick I can fill my computer lagging so here's the Save button and I found that working with offsets or in sets it puts a lot of labor on the silhouette studio software so just save your work frequently right now my measurement is at point zero three five I'm going to zoom in here and see how I like the relationships of my lines right now and that's pretty close to 1/32 so I'm gonna work in increments of 1/8 for this project now that I'm happy with this I'm going to click and drag that layer to the side and now while it's all still grouped together I'm going to right click and say make compound bath so I'll zoom out here we can move this layer to the side now we'll go back to our original one here and do the same process again internal offset and since the first one was about 1/32 I'm going to use the sixteenth for this one which is 0.0625 and hit apply now I'm going to click and actually select it and dragged away my original so I'm going to draw a box around this copy I inset and make that a compound path now I'll move that layer out of the way and come back to our original again do an internal offset and I'll try out 0.125 and hit apply drag that away and once again that drug my original so I'm gonna draw a box around and hit make compound path and there is another layer internal offset you next should be point two five in my increments but what I found with that one was that it was actually getting too large so even at point two four or five you can see that this pretty much looks like my original this measurement is too large to create an inset still so at that point I'm just gonna freehand it and push the down arrow so that I can see the new lines being created and I kind of just compare that to what my last layer looks like and eyeball it to see that it's a different pattern so I'm going to hit apply here at point one five zero and then we'll drag that away and you can see that this layer is different from that layer so I'm okay with it and honestly for something this small of a design I probably wouldn't create this many layers but the request was for six layers so I'm trying to make it there with this design so right now we're at one two three four five so we'll see if we can come up with a six-layer once again go back to this original one internal offset and since our last one was that point one five zero we'll start there and hit the UP button and we can tell that these new lines are smaller than those so I'll go ahead move it up a few more and I think that's about as small is we're going to be able to you know get a good cut on it to make a difference in our layering here so I'll hit apply at point two once again drag that away like all of these and they come back back now we have our six layers this we don't actually need anymore but I'm gonna keep it over here in case something goes wrong and I need to redo an inset again now we're going to come to this outline shape that we saved at the beginning and we need to make as many copies of that as we have layers now this is our original so it won't be needing one but we have five other layers so I need to make four more copies here is a bonus silhouette tip for you you can of course do control the right click copy paste but you can also hold down alt while you click and drag away a shape and that will create more copies for you so I'm going to make sure that I have five of these and I found that it's easiest to go ahead and select all of these copies and go ahead and send that shape to the back by clicking this icon here and that's gonna come into play later so now why they're all grouped together it's just easier to go ahead and do it now and also we're gonna make these a color just so that we can make sure that all of them got sent to the back so now we're going to roughly put these near each of our inset layers and then we're going to select both of those layers the inset and the blue outer line now and click the center button and depending on how your insetting went you may notice that sometimes it doesn't actually Center these because sometimes when you create and said it doesn't get you know finer dots if it doesn't look like it's centered then use the keyboard to make fine adjustments until you reach that center point but hopefully your inset went well and you can just click the centering button and we'll do it for you now with both of these layers still highlighted we're going to come over here to our modify panel and hit the subtract button and this is what we want our final piece to look like so we're going to do that process again for each of our layers so select both of them Center and then subtract so lights both Center subtract and now we have all of our layers finished so to get a preview of what this is ultimately going to look like I am going to change the colors of all of these layers and get a preview of our final project this one is going to be our bottom most piece so I don't want to spend a lot of time on recoloring it cuz I did when I made my first example in the opening credits video but try to not be so picky at this time and just kind of get some good looking colors on here so we can see what it's going to look like maybe throw in a pink for this layer and I did like the white looking color on top so now I'm going to start with my bottom one and you're gonna make sure that your pieces are going to layer like they will in your final project so right now this piece should be showing up on top of this one but it's not so I'm gonna go up here and say bring that one to the front and that'll change how those layer together and this one again is at the back so I'll move it back to the front and this one I'll go ahead and click move to front that's one move to front like this last piece and also I don't like all of these red cut lines showing up so I'm going to select this whole pile and just change it to no cut lines that makes it look a lot prettier so once again we're gonna hit our sensor button and that'll give us a preview of how all of these layers are gonna line up together and at this point you know if there's something that you didn't like you could always create a different one or change it any way you need it to so I'm seeing here that perhaps this blue layer is maybe not even worth having this looks a lot prettier to me so if this were my final project I'd probably just cut these pieces instead so I always recommend to go ahead and do a preview of your file but since we're trying to stick with the six layers I am going to keep this piece in there and we'll see how it turns out now that I've showed you the important part of how to set up the file in silhouette studio just decided to kind of let the camera roll on the rest of my process and not leave out some of the problems that I ran into while trying to do this so here was our original that I just showed and then I separated it all back out into the six layers and gave them different colors that I hoped that my final project would end up looking like so what I decided was that I was going to paint my wood first before putting it in the glowforge so I decided that to divide up my wood I would draw lines so that I could section each area out and know where to put paint so I roughly just drew some lines between each of my sections this is the perfect project for either painting or staining the different colors ahead of time because you do have all of these intricate pieces it would just make it a lot easier to go ahead and do that so I saved this file and then sent it to the glowforge here's my file uploaded into the GF UI and I'm using the medium draft board settings but this is not proof grade material so you can see I set all of my mandala layers to ignore and then the lines I drew I set to score so by thinking is that I'm going to score these lines on the board first and that's the only thing that it's going to do so that'll create my little panel so I know where to put each of my colors for my mandela layers so this is only going to take 31 seconds so I'll hit the print button and head over to the glowforge to get this started [Music] after it finished scoring I lined up my paints on my board by looking at my computer screen and comparing to see which colors in my paint collection I thought would look nice then I moved those off to the side and tried to keep them in the same order so I would remember what panel they went with and then I started to painting and honestly I'm more of a spray paint person just because it's faster and has a better coverage for me so please don't judge my painting skills here it was at night where I couldn't go out and spray paint and I was just eager to see how this project would turn out I also realized that I have used these sponges a few too many times and it's time to order more supplies as these were my last one so that's why I've got a little bit streaky ultimately I went over it using a makeup sponge to help smooth some of that out more after the paint dried I covered the whole board in this masking tape material and I'll put a link to the one I use in the description below and you really want to make sure that the tape adheres very well to your board because you don't want your masking tape to get loose and have the laser contact it that's where some people are having some issues with flames inside their glowforge so I'm using my scraper from final crafting to make sure that that is stuck to the board really well and then I fold the edges over on the side next I put my board back into my glowforge and then my design is still here in the gfu I like I left it so I set my score lines now to ignore and all of my mandalas to cut so I'm just going to go through each one of these and change that setting I can see where each of my paint blocks are underneath my masking so I still have the opportunity to adjust my positioning of my mandalas to make sure that they are within each of the separate colors and that they're not overlapping on to another color and now I'll go up here and hit the print button so we can get a new estimated time for this Cup 17 minutes and 30 seconds so I'll hit the print button head over to the glowforge and get this started remember earlier when I said I would like a camera roll on with some of the problems I had while making this well the good news is that each of the mendala layers did cut within their color section but the bad news is by the time I pulled this out of the glowforge I realized that the mandalas had not all cut all the way through the board I did still want to leave all of the pre painting process in because I do still think that that is the best way to do an intricate layered design like this unfortunately I probably should have bumped the power up a little bit to make sure that it would cut all the way through because this was not the proof grade medium draft board like I said it to cut high inside a test cut would have been a fabulous idea but you know sometimes it just happens so here's my take - I threw in an actual piece of medium draft board proof grade material and recut all of them in dollars again of course the proof grade material from glowforge comes with the masking already on it so this is not pre painted I just threw the board in there like it was because I'm so anxious to see how these cuts are gonna turn out and I'll just paint it later at this point here for your viewing pleasure and confidence booster is a picture of the disaster is pre painted mandalas so you can see here that it basically ended up scoring because it didn't cut all the way through and some of the layers like the pink one still look pretty so I might repurpose that for something else but you can see at the top of the screen that is the top layer and since it had the thinnest cuts it ended up breaking into a bunch of pieces instead of coming apart like it was supposed to but we'll just get this failed project moved out of the way and start working on weeding this proof grade one that did cut all the way through [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] finally here it is all six layers stacked together and I think that this turned out beautifully I'm so happy with how the file ended up cutting because this was my first time creating a mandala and ultimately I decided for me I liked it better with one of them having four layers and then I'm gonna use this other one on the Left which is two layers as a separate project so there's a bonus even if you cut it out and decide you want to only use a few of your layers you have that option to let me know if you have any suggestions because again this was my first time even attempting to make a file like this so if you have any tips for me please let me know in the comments and again check us out on the globe foragers using silhouette studio facebook group finally thank you again to Eric s for using my referral code when you bought your glowforge if you want to save money on the purchase of your glow porch also please click on my referral link in the description you save money and I get the same in exchange for more materials to keep creating so when I make accidents it's no big deal I deeply appreciate anytime my referral code is used so thank you again eric s and thank you everyone for watching

Channel: Lady Crockett Crafts

Views: 7,437

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Id: gtVhFiMws4I

Length: 23min 4sec (1384 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 12 2020