Silhouette Tutorial with Traci

Hi everyone, it’s Traci and I’m back with a tutorial for making welded outline titles. For this project, I created a Father’s Day gift card holder. This card is one of Lori’s newest files, complete with a pocket for tucking in a gift card to Dad’s favorite store or restaurant.

And here are step-by-step instructions for creating a welded outline title like the one I made for this pocket:

Step 1: Choose a thick, chunky font and spread the letters out a bit. I used Lori’s font called LW Clementine.

Step 2: Highlight your word and ungroup the letters (right click, ungroup)

Step: 3: Highlight the letters and go to the “Offset” window. Hit Offset and use the sliding bar to adjust the size. I set mine around 0.025. (You do not have to color fill your shape…I just did this to show you more details.

Step 4: Once your offset is done, highlight each letter individually and group the letter with the offset (right click, group). Then highlight each letter, right click, and hit “Make Compound Path”.

Step 5: Now move your letters so that they overlap each other (to keep them in a straight line, highlight them and use your right or left arrow to move them). Once they are overlapped the way you want them, highlight the whole word, right click and hit weld.

Here is another example of how I used this technique on a layout. For the “SMILE” I overlapped the letters, and even rotated them a bit before welding.

Clementine font

Father’s Day Card

Have fun making these welded titles for your projects and thanks for letting me share this technique with you today!

Traci

www.artsyalbums.com

5 Comments

If you want a different look, try doing an internal offset.

Thank you so much for the tutorial. I have just started to play with my Portrait, and I feel like I need a lot of training. Unfortunately, I don’t have a mouse with a right click. I use an Apple computer, so I guess I’ll have to figure out some different steps in there.
Love the outlined look 🙂