I hadn’t really thought about how I would use the distressing tool, but I was given the opportunity to have a play with it and am totally hooked. I chose the 'Hibiscus' font as I have always loved these flowers they remind me of bright sunny days. After choosing the designs, I imported them onto a blank screen.
- Goto the SHAPE dropdown menu click on Engraving then click on inside. A new box titled engraving fill will appear.
- I set my tool at 0.02 as I wanted to really distress my flowers, (if you only want a light finish then set it higher). I then chose an s-sweep for the motion of the tool. Apply this to your image( if you are doing multiple images do them separately as it will be a lot faster than trying to do them all at once). You will see that your image changes and has lots and lots of fill lines inside the image. You are now ready to distress.
If there is no distress feature in your cut menu, the best way to start I found is to use draw, once you have perfected the right settings for your machine you can then set up the distressing feature by adding it using the media button in your cut menu. - I found that I had to repeat the distressing process 3 times to get the desired effect I was after, but I did reduce the pressure of my tool for the last pass through. I was really happy with the finished flowers this will also work well with border images and lettering fonts. The best cardstock to use is white core cardstock or the new whitewash cardstock from Co-Ordinations.
-
-
When I was finished I added an .03 outline to my images (Tools - then Outline) and cut them out, remember to change back to your cutting blade for this.
This tool definitely needs to be in your Inspiration tool kit, it adds so much dimension to the project. One final thing always give your machine a quick vacuum to remove the debris left behind after using the distressing tool.
Till next time, have fun with your Creative Cutter
Darelle xx
Comments