Hot Air Balloon for Lynn G

by | Feb 5, 2009 | Designing, Free Videos, Hot Air Balloons - Designing, Polyarc


I have another GREAT designing challenge to show you today! Thanks to Lynn G who posted a request on the KNK Studio GE Yahoo Group for help with desiging a hot air balloon. Once again, I had to play around for a bit, walk outside and think about it for a bit, and then it hit me that the secret was, once again, in the power of polyarc editing.

Here’s a link to the video:
Designing a Hot Air Balloon

A couple of things I discovered after making the video:

  • If you’d like to expand the balloon to include two more colors for the complete range of a rainbow, then just make your circle 3.5″ instead of 2.5″ and you can add two more circles/colors: see below.
  • When I tested 3.5″, it seemed that I needed to tweak the top node more, plus you’ll have two nodes on the left side to delete, rather than just one. But otherwise, it works the same.
  • You might want to flatten your balloon a bit after creating it. I just shortened the height without changing the width: again see below.
  • You might not want the circles spaced perfectly at 0.25″ each. To get a more realistic 3D look, try making the outer segments thinner and gradually increasing in size towards the middle. For the sake of time, I didn’t do this, but you can experiment with it yourself after you make your first one.

    • Once again, Klic-N-Kut Studio comes through for us with flying colors! (Pardon the pun! :P)


    Sherri’s Dinosaur

    by | Feb 3, 2009 | Editing, Free Files, Free Videos, Outlining Images, Tracing

    At the new KNK_Groove Yahoo group, Sherri P posted that she was having some problems following the user manual tutorial on tracing. I replied that the new Vectorize Wizard is so loaded with functionality that it can be overwhelming to follow the many steps I show in the manual. Because Sherri had scanned the image she wanted to trace and only needed a simple tracing, I suggested she send me the file so that I could show her a quick way to trace it.

    Well, the interesting thing about this particular image (and why my readers here ended up with a free video) is that this is a situation outside of what we normally see when tracing. First of all, one would think this would be ideal for using center line tracing because it’s basically an outlined image with a white filled center (refer to my Center Line Tracing video or any of the KNK Studio manuals). I tried Center Line Tracing, however instead of ending up with separate puzzle pieces (the goal of this project), I had an overall outline of the dinosaur with separate, disconnected lines for the middle of the dinosaur. Now this would be perfect if the user planned to just cut the outside of the dinosaur and then, perhaps, dash-line cut the intererior lines. But to achieve 3 separate puzzle pieces, Accuscan would be needed instead.

    Now tracing it was easy (as you’ll see in the video). The next issue was that the trace lines will be made on either side of the outlines of the image. In most cases, this is also never a problem. But with Sherri’s project, we needed to end up with three puzzle pieces that fit together. So, I came up with the idea of using Transform>Outline to make some of the pieces just a tiny bit bigger, resulting in a better puzzle fit.

    So, check out the video and I also am including a link to the original KNK file sent to me by Sherri in case you want to play along! Special note to non-Groove and non-Maxx owners: this same method should work for those of you with the original monochromatic vectorizing (just use the Scan and Trace Wizard) and those of you with color vectorization (same method I show in the video).

    Tracing and Editing Sherri’s Dinosaur

    And then here is the original file:
    Dino Puzzle To Trace

    I also sell a video on using the Auto Tracing for KNK, ACS, DM and plan to have a new one soon covering the details of the Vectorize Wizard available in the latest KNK Studio Maxx software.