by Sandy McCauley | Mar 31, 2009 | Easter Eggs - Designing, Hot Keys, Polyarc, Shortcuts, Transformation, Welding
The main purpose of this video is not so much about the Easter egg, but rather to illustrate a great assortment of tools and hot keys available in KNK Studio… functions you will be able to use elsewhere in your design work with this wonderful software. Some of these have been covered in other videos and the usage of them in this video will be a reminder. But there are also a couple of new things I show.
While watching the video, take note of the following functions:
Tranformations: used to distort images -I use it to convert an oval to an egg shape. As a reminder when using the functions in this window, you get different results if you also hold the Ctrl key versus the Shift key versus no key. Try it out!
In Polygon editing mode, select any two nodes and then press “I” on the keyboard to insert nodes
Similarly, in Polyarc editing mode, there is a Divide icon in the Smart Bar which allows you to insert a specific number of nodes along the path between any two existing nodes.
Use the Stroke and Fill tools to thicken any open path and then use the Basic Weld tool to convert to a closed path.
Select an image and place the cursor over the center. Hold down both Alt and Ctrl keys on your keyboard and drag the center. A copy of the image will be created and you can only drag the image horizontally or vertically to keep it aligned with the original.
When Object A is on top of and extends beyond Object B, use the AND Weld tool to trim the excess from Object A to fit Object B.
When moving an object on the screen, hold down the Shift key while using the arrow keys on the keyboard and the object will move much faster than if you only use the arrow keys alone.
If you have ANY questions about the use of these functions, be sure to post. And here’s the link to the Easter Egg Video!
by Sandy McCauley | Mar 24, 2009 | Array, Flowers - Designing, Free Files, Free Videos, Outlining Images, Transformation
Thanks to Pam Z for requesting help in designing a particular kind of flower to cut from vinyl. As always, these requests motivate me to try new things in the software and I found a way to design a different kind of petal and then use the circular Array function to create a quick flower from the petal. The video can be viewed at:
Creating a Hollow Petal Flower
If you’d also like the .knk file of the two flowers I show above, then just grab it from here:
Hollow Petal Flowers
by Sandy McCauley | Dec 28, 2008 | Designing, Free Videos, Mud Puddles - Designing, Transformation
A while back, CeCe asked me if I knew how to design a mud puddle in KNK Studio. Now, I knew that I could just show how to use the freehand tool and simply draw one. But most users, including me, aren’t that crazy about freehand drawing unless we are tracing an existing image. So, off and on, I had been thinking about how to design one easily in KNK Studio. Finally, this morning, it hit me. While I knew the key was using Transform>Transformation, I wasn’t getting the look I wanted from any of the shapes I chose at the start: circle, oval, star, rounded rectangle, etc. Then it just suddenly came to me that I hadn’t tried modifying a star before applying the transformation. Bingo! It resulted in exactly the look I had in my mind… which is somewhat similar to the Sizzix Splats die. Anyhow, here’s a quick video to show you how I created the ones you see above. Note that the possibilities are endless in terms of all of the possible looks. Just try using more or less points on your star.
Making a Mud Puddle Video
by Sandy McCauley | Jun 28, 2008 | Contour Object, Free Videos, Round Corner, Transformation
After discovering that using a marquis-select during Transform>Contour Object would produce another outline, I then started experiment with marquis-select while inside other Transform menu functions. Here’s what I found:
- Under Transform>Round Corner, after you’ve set a corner radius, you can reset back to 0, by marquis-selecting your object. This is useful since there is no Reset button on the Smart Bar in that window.
- Under Transform>Transformation, you can distort your image, then marquis-select and it will return you to the main Sign Blank… but wait! If you then do an Undo (Edit>Undo or Ctrl-Z), you will not only get your original back but you will still have your transformed image. Now this would be very useful if you want to create a variety of different transformations from the same original image. Let’s say you wanted to create a starfish and have a number of them with slightly different looks… very quick using this method!
In light of reports that this is not as easy at it looks, I created a quickie video showing exactly what I’m doing. Watch this: Transformation Quirk
