Silhouette Studio Drawing

[Agnella Datson]

Thereare so many designs for your electronic cutters for sale and also for free.

Anyway I find it cool to make my own designs and I encourage everyone to do this, too. SilhouetteStudio is a perfect tool and with some simple steps you got something with your own personal touch.

4.

If the second foot is not perfect in position you can adjust it now.

Be aware it is not about perfection. All those little irregularities are giving your drawing that personal unique touch.

11.

Save your work.

Make sure the lines are set to cut.

Chose the material in the material type window and adjust the settings and blade.

Load your mat with the paper into your cutting machine and send to Silhouette.

I made a lot of new things for the fair and some files in Studio especially for this event like these snow flakes.

It is one page filled with snow flakes of different shapes and sizes. They are cutting very well with white card stock even if they are small.

You just click to download here:

snow flakes .studio file

It looks as if I will have more german followers now. So I started to create another blog in german language. There are not too many informations and tutorials for the Silhouette software and machines in german so I plan to focus on Silhouette related things and tutorials more while I focus on artistic things more on my english blog.

Does this work on the go? or would i have to be in front of my Mac? I cant seem to figure out how to work on the go in the Silhouette Studio app on my ipad pro and be able to sync my work on to my desk top. Any advise?

Do you have any advice for PC users ? I have a Wacom tablet , that I would love to use with my silhouette but there isn't much info regarding using them together . The little bit of information I have found seems like everything must be designed in a completely different software and then pulled into Sil design studio using the trace feature .

The Silhouette Cameo is effectively a glorified plotter that cuts materials as well as draws on them. Plotters have been around for a long time (I remember using one in the 1980s) and use a pen in a cartridge to draw pictures in a similar way that a person would. They have traditionally been used to print engineering and architectural designs and line illustrations. While the Cameo can act like a traditional plotter, its main function is to cut out shapes. The video at the bottom of this post is from Silhouette gives you a better idea of what happens.

GNR 6 -wheel coach from styrene. This is my current project. The beading in the first photo is in .010" styrene and is approximately 0.45mm wide. Sorry I'm mixing my measuring systems! The windows in the back layer were scored and snapped and needed tidying up when the first photo was taken.

At the time of writing, there are 184 people subscribed to this thread and 168 people have a Silhouette cutter or alternative. So that new comers to the machine can get a head start I've decided to update this index post so that it includes both tutorials on this thread and on other threads and blogs. That said, there is still a lot of information in one-off posts in this thread, so if you have a few days spare, it's worth looking at. You'll also see some of the incredible work done by the members.

That's cool Nile, you should be using the Silhouette Studio software as well. It'll be interesting to see how the Silhouette Portrait compares with the Cameo. You'll have to let us know where they diverge. By the looks of the two specification sheets, the difference seems to be the maximum cutting width.silhouette and the fact that the portrait doesn't have an SD card slot. I've never used this feature. I've had a quick look at prices on Amazon, and there seems to be a 110GBP difference with the portrait at 150GBP and the cameo at 260GBP. Based on that, it looks like if you are using styrene or card no wider than letter or A4 then the Portrait might be a better bet.

To answer some of these, the software that comes with the cutter isn't the best in the world but you can get around its shortcomings very easily. Once you understand the tricks you can work fairly quickly to put drawings together. the coach drawing below took me about an hour to rough out and then thirty minutes to fine tune, for example. If you use CorelDraw or Adobe Illustrator there is a utility that will allow you to cut directly from those applications.

With regards to the materials that can be cut, when I bought the Cameo I was only going to use it with card and laminate the sides together. This is exactly what I did with the signal box that I built. I actually used coloured card for the windows and the window frames, white card to go around that and then I hand cut brick paper to finish. In the end I think I used about seven layers of card. Here's a photo of the window that was on my signal box thread. The wave in the vertical part of the frame was down to my bad gluing! You might be able to make out the sash window below. I'll be covering those later.

Two limitations are the thickness and the resistance of the materials. Although the blade extends to approximately 1mm, or .040", you will only be able to cut through styrene up to .015" thick (someone here has done it: -361584.html), after that you will be scoring and snapping. I tend to use .010" and .020" styrene, and have just tested .040" for this thread. .010" cuts, the other two definitely score only. At some point you will find that the styrene is too thick to get under the blade.

I can guarantee that you can cut customizable designs. That should be a given, shouldn't it? I'm afraid that if you have a Cricut machine at home, which is one of the Silhouette's competitors, then unfortunately you are going to be out of luck. These machines will only let you cut using designs in cartridges. The cartridges are expensive, and I doubt they'll have that GNR coach you were looking to put together! The Cameo can cut very small designs and cut thin strips of styrene. I've managed to cut beading on mine that is about 0.5mm thick which I think equates to .020".

Don't take my word for it though, the Cameo was right for me, and if the Portrait had been around when I bought it, I might have gone for that instead, $110 for an extra 4" is a lot of money, only you know if it's worth it.

I think you might have noticed that I'm passing between metric and imperial measurements all of the time. I'm afraid it's a product of my upbringing as well as the fact that I'm in Canada, like the UK it's nominally decimalised, but there are gaps and influences. A lot of my stuff, and a lot of the documentation on the internet is from the States for example

Cheers Al. One thing about the Wills sheets being too thick and small, its is this combination that's a problem. Just to make it clear, you can use small sheets of thinner materials, for example a bit of scrap card or styrene that you want to cut a small design into.

Hi all, I have been using the cameo for about 6 months now and am still finding it's capabilities out. It does however allow me to tackle projects that I wouldn't have even been game to attempt by hand.

The panelling is part of the platform buildings on my layout of Wigan Wallgate ex L&Y station, 5 various buildings in all. The trips to the chemist for plasters would have far outweighed the cost of the machine if past efforts are anything to go by .

The building below had all the window openings cut by the cameo and the windows frames were cut out following a design done in a slightly better cad program than the one supplied, the building itself is developed from a couple of photos of the actual building in Wigan. All of the above were either printed onto or cut directly from self adhesive label paper prior to sticking onto a thicker card and then cut or in the case of the windows clear sheet.

Your cutter, whether it's Portrait or Cameo will actually come with a 12" long mat. The mat isn't really anything special; it's just a sheet of thin plastic (I've seen place mats of the same material) with tacky glue on it, so in theory, if you got one of those cheap place mats you could make your own by masking the edges and spraying 3M repositional mount on it. I've two mats, a 12"x12" and a 12"x24" They have lasted me about a year, and I've only had to reglue the long one once following it's altercation with a long haired dog

Based on the fact that they are the same machine, just narrower, then you're right about the Portrait. If you position the coach sides so that they are vertical, then you could easily cut them out on it.

Today's topic is about software. Up until now I've been using the software that came with the cutter, but I was surprised at the number of different options that are available, each with their pros and cons, and with prices ranging from $0 to $400 (and beyond if you start buying CAD - Computer Aided Design - programs).

Computers can create and save pictures as either raster image or vector images. A raster image, such as a photo, is any image that is made up of pixels, or dots of colours. Vector images are made of paths defined by mathematical expressions. These paths can create lines, circles, and other shapes.

As you can see from the circles in the illustrations above, the red raster circle on the left loses definition as you zoom in, whereas the white vector circle on the right doesn't. This shows that a design created using vector files is scalable. To put it bluntly, a vector design that is printed three feet high will be as sharp as a design that's created three inches high. Vector files use many different file types, the main ones being .SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) and .DXF (Drawing eXchange Format).

To create a cutting file you need some sort of drawing program that produces vector files that the cutter can understand, or software that will allow you to take a raster file and create a vector file from it either automatically or using drawing tools.

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