Individual Vinyl Cutting Project
I started my assignment with planning out what I would do. I wanted something to go on my phones case, so I thought of some ideas. While I was browsing, I found a small clip art dragon, and saved it to my folder. Then I placed it in Illustrator, and turned it into a vector image by selecting "Image Trace" and "Expand". Then I entered in the size that I wanted the dragon to be, which was roughly 2 inches by 2.5 inches. I clicked "File", and "Save As". Then I went back and deleted the body, and the two tail parts, and other lines outside of the design. I saved it to another file, and repeated the process with the other three parts, so I had a file for each part. I plugged my flash drive in and copied the 4 parts over, and pulled it out.
Then I took my flash drive to the laptop next to the vinyl cutter, and opened up the Illustrator files. Next I went to the vinyl cutter, and put in my first roll of vinyl, which was colored grey. I lined up the vinyl roll with the wheels, but then went back to the laptop to send the files to the vinyl cutter. I sent them to the vinyl cutter, and went back to the machine to hit "F1 Force" and "Enter". This began the process of measuring the vinyl and cutting the decal out. I repeated this process with the other 3 designs, each in a different color: grey, cyan, blue, and black. After each design was cut I cut off the decal from the roll and gathered up the four sheets.
I then trimmed the excess off with a scissors, and picked off the vinyl around the decal with a dental pick. Next I matched up the pieces and got them close to each other. I cut out a section of a large roll of tape, and stuck it to the decal pieces, then pressed down, smoothing out bubbles and making sure the vinyl stuck to the tape and not the backing. I removed the tape and the vinyl stuck to it, and placed it onto my phone case, and pressed down on the vinyl. Last, I slowly peeled off the tape, and was left with just the vinyl on my phone case.
I learned how to put a file into Illustrator and turn it into a very small vector image. I also learned how to turn that image into separate pieces, and then cut them out using a vinyl cutter. After that I learned how to arrange the piece together and then attach tape to the decal to turn it into something that can be put onto almost any surface. Lastly, I learned how to attach the decal to something as small as my phone case, which only had an space of 2 by 2 inches to put the decal.