Alternative to Clipping for DM/WB/CR/SILH Users

On June 25, I posted about a feature in KNK Studio which allows you to fill letters with a pattern for a print and cut. Thanks to some posters at the UK Scrappers board, I determined that you can use Microsoft Word to also fill letters with a fill/texture and then import that image for auto-tracing in Design Master and in RoboMaster or Wishblade 3.0. Here is an example of such as image:


And the link to watch the video showing the creation of this title is at:

Alternative to Clipping

Granted you can do this in a lot of other programs: Photoshop, PSP, Elements, etc, but I was happy to see an alternative that’s already installed on so many more computers. 🙂

Clipping

There’s a menu item under Arrange called “Clipping” and, because I couldn’t find a use for it, I basically ignored it while writing the KNK User Manual. I asked Chad at Accugraphic what it was for and he showed me how it worked, but we were using vector images and I couldn’t see how it provided anything more than what we got from using the AND weld tool.

Well, late yesterday, I was browsing CADLink’s forum and someone was wanting to fill a vector image with a pattern and CADLink’s response was to use the Clipping function. Hello? Clipping? I immediately remembered we had that feature in KNK Studio but I hadn’t never been told that it worked with raster images!

So, I played with with and discovered you can “fill” any vector image with clipart or a photo or, what they call a texture…. and there are hundreds of free textures out on the Internet… just google “free textures!” For the most part, this would probably be used in a Print and Cut situation. And I also show in my demo video how to shrink your trace lines so that you remove the error you get when cutting too close to the outside of a colored image. ClippingVideo

If you’ve ever seen the Lettering Delight Alphabets sold at http://www.letteringdelights.com/, then this is exactly a way to create some of their original ones, except you’ll be able to cut them with your KNK or CR/WB/Silhouette! Also, this would be useful, if you wanted to cut out a foldup box, for example, and you wanted it to be colored with a particular pattern. You could even scan in your own patterns from your patterned paper collection. You could also use these kinds of patterns for paper doll clothes or how about cutting out the shape of a suitcase from a montage of vacation photos. Oh… the possibilities are endless! 🙂