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Vinyl decals are a simple, colorful way of dressing up water bottles, mailboxes, walls and many other everyday objects. Check out Pinterest’s vinyl cutter projects and Etsy’s vinyl decals for a range of stunning examples. This week, we introduced workshop participants to the CAMEO electronic cutting tool using Inkscape and animal silhouettes.
Animal silhouettes make easily recognizable decals. The sticker you create is identical to the image you start with, so concepts of negative and positive space are clear from the beginning. Search Google Images for your favorite animal, and the word silhouette, outline or vector; for example: horse silhouette. Silhouettes, outlines and vectors produce paths quickly.
Once you find an image you like, you’ll download it, then open it in Inkscape. Inkscape has a Trace Bitmap function allowing us to quickly turn the image into a vector graphic. Logos and fonts are familiar vector graphics. You’re encouraged to save it as an SVG if you want to work with the image in the future. For the CAMEO cutter, you’ll save it as a DXF, or desktop cutting plotter file, which serves as cutting instructions for the CAMEO.
The CAMEO cutter looks and acts much like a printer. We load the vinyl into the front, and instead of an ink cartridge, there’s a small, secure cutting tool. Once we set up the file and click Cut, you can hear the tool sliding back and forth, cutting the image out of the vinyl. You’ll have your animal silhouette in minutes. The hard part is deciding where to place it!
