Creating Badges / Ornaments Adding SVG Clipart to Gravit

 

My first  Gravit tutorial featuring an  Ornament or Badge  used primitive shapes and a stencil fonts to keep things as simple as possible.  But what if you want to use a font that is not a Stencil font or expand your choice of images?   Here is a cardboard prototype of an ornament for my grand-daughter, Rosie, along with a poplar wood version.

Today's tutorial is the fourth in the following series, where I'd like to share my next steps in learning how to design in tools that work on Chromebooks for  the GlowForge.

1) From Google Drawing to  Lasercut Designs for the Glowforge - Getting Started

2) From Google Drawing to  Lasercut Design for the Glowforge -  Next Steps

3) Creating Laser Cut Designs using Gravit -- a Cloud based Vector App - Getting Started

4) Creating Laser Cut Designs using Gravit -- Next Steps

Here is a short video tutorial that will help you add more personalized SVG clipart to your ornament.   This tutorial builds on the Getting Started Tutorial  from my last blog post. 

In the tutorial above, I used this image from Those Icons   from www.flaticon.com

For this project, I wanted to find a simple silhouette that would lend itself to be 'cut' out of wood.   There are several places to find great icons, including Flat Icon and IconFinder where, you can find lots of SVG images that are free to use with attribution.  Here is the attribution for the graphic used in the video tutorial?

Flower free vector icons designed by bqlqn https://www.flaticon.com/free-icon/flower_3096939?term=rose via @flaticon

 My favorite place to look for icon's that might work well is THE NOUN PROJECT with over a million images.

I love this site so much that I subscribe to the Noun PRO version for  less than $20 per year if you are an educator. This allows me to use any icon on the site without attribution and also adds features such as SVG download  and a few other apps  for easy integration with tools such as Google Slides, Adobe products, etc.

The trick is to look for a shape that will work well for your project.  The shape below could work well if you are trying to cut out a rose out of a round circular disk. But if you wanted to insert it inside a hollow circle, you would have to make sure that each part overlaps with the circular rim, so that the piece doesn't just fall out. 

Once you download the SVG image, you can use the the IMPORT Image under the File Menu Item to bring your SVG graphic into your design. This short video tutiorial 

can walk you through the process of successfully integrating SVG files.

Using the Compound Shape tool in Gravit is key to ending up with an ornament or badge that can be successfully cut on a laser cutter.   Here is more information about  creating compound shapes.

To better understand how to work with shapes in Gravit, I highly recommend working through 

John Umekubo's Gravit tutorials.

John's short tutorials clearly describe the basics of Gravit, including working with compound shapes and with paths. 

In my  next tutorial I'll add show you how to expand your choice of fonts when using a laser cutter.