Making a drawing for solid color decal

[maryr18]

I am trying to make a solid color iron on decal to send to my Cricut cutter.  I would also like to use this for a vinyl car decal.  I drawn the outline of a feather and need to make a cut out "cavity" down the center to represent or highlight the quill.  I tried drawing the section to be cut out but I don't know what I'm doing wrong.  The feather still looks solid.  I'm attaching pictures of what I have and a sample of what I want.  Please help a newbie.

This horse is an image I found online as a reference.  The open "highlights" is what I want to make on my feather.  Thank you for your help.

[Monika Gause · Accepted solution]

When you have drawn the path, you can just use the pathfinder panel to subtract it from the drawing.

How to combine objects in Illustrator

[maryr18]

Thank you for the link.  It worked perfectly!  I followed the steps for "combine objects using compound paths." 

Now I should "unite" all objects to connect them?

[maryr18]

It's always something, isn't it...

Now Cricut won't accept all of the elements of my drawing as I saved them.

[JETalmage]

Mary,

You're probably making this more complicated than it is. Full details are needed to answer your specific questions, but as general advice:

Consider what a vinyl cutter does: It just cuts along paths. After cutting, you then "weed" the unwanted portions from the carrier sheet of the material  by hand, be they the "background" material surrounding the feather or the "hole" in the feather shaped like its quill.

As you draw, always bear in mind that the cutter is going to simply cut along the paths you send to it, and the whole of the paths. For example, if you have two same-colored circles that partially overlap, the cutter is not going to cut according to "what you see," which looks like one solid  "binocular view" shape. It's going to cut both of the circle paths, resulting in three pieces of vinyl. In other words, you are going to have two unwanted "cross cuts."

In other words, for vinyl cutting, the cutting program doesn't "need to know" which paths are "holes" and which paths aren't. It just needs the paths for its knife to follow. Your goal is to draw paths exactly representing the paths you want the knife to follow; nothing more and nothing less. So there're probably no need at all to create what are called "compound paths" by using the so-called Pathfinder commands for the sake of the cutter; doing that is just for the sake of your own visualization.

For example, if you…:

1. Drew a path in the shape of the outline of the feather, with a white fill and no stroke applied to that path.
2. Drew another path in the shape of the quill that runs down the center of the feather, with a white fill and no stroke applied to that path.

…Then to your eyes, you have a white-filled path in front of another white-filled path. You can't see the quill shaped path. The feather would, as you say, "still look solid." But two paths are still there, and the cutter is going to cut them both.

So just for the sake of what you see, you could use a Boolean subtract operation (Pathfinder) so that the fill of the quill shape visually "punches a hole" in the feather shape.

But even if you did that, and the raster image you are tracing is still behind the paths you are drawing, chances are, the feather would still "look solid," because you'd still be seeing the white of the raster image you are tracing inside the "hole."

Nonetheless, the cutting program just cares about the paths. The two paths to cut are still there, whether you compound them or not.

Bottom line is, when tracing images to create cutting paths, you'd do yourself a favor by making this your habit:

1. Set your current fill color to none, your current stroke color to black, and your current stroke weight to a thin value.
2. Draw the paths, exactly as you want the knife to follow, nothing more; nothing less. Now, as you do so, you can see what you're doing. Don't worry about which paths for a particular color vinyl are "holes" and which are not. The cutter isn't printing. It's just cutting.

That way, as you draw the paths, you're always just looking at a representation of what the cutter knife is going to do. The "color" of those paths is just a function of whatever color vinyl you've loaded into the cutter. Which cut paths are "holes" is just a function of which portions of the cut vinyl you weed out and discard.

JET

[Monika Gause]

maryr18  schrieb

Now I should "unite" all objects to connect them?

That depends on the exact nature of the artwork and how you want it to look like after plotting.

Please describe the issue with Cricut not accepting. We need more details (are there error messages, what exactly is happening?) It might help to see the actual file. You can upload it to Dropbox or the like and post a link here.