Hello and welcome to Design Space Daily; helping you learn Cricut Design Space in
short and snappy video tutorials. The contour tool in Cricut Design Space lets
you hide unwanted parts of an image or SVG by removing cut lines. It's an
incredibly powerful tool because it lets you create your own custom designs with
just a few clicks of your mouse. Let's see how it works.
I've opened up Design Space, clicked into images and found some images from
the quick access library that I'm going to use to show you how the contour tool
works. The contour tool is for removing cut lines that you don't want on a
single layer of image. Let's take this unicorn for example. If I wanted to cut
out JUST the unicorn and I didn't want all of the hearts, I wouldn't need to use
the contour tool here. Look in the layers panel and you can see that each of the
different colors is on a separate layer, so what I need to do to hide those
hearts is to press the eye icon next to each of the colors of hearts and they'll
disappear. That will mean I could only cut the unicorn. But wait, it's still
got all those purple hearts around it! I don't want to cut those either, but if I
click on the eye it's gonna remove the whole thing.
That's where contour comes in. Down at the bottom of the screen, click the contour
button and it will give you a pop-up. You can use the + and - icons to zoom
in or out. If we look at this heart on the top of the unicorns head and I click
it, you can see that's now been hidden. On the contour pop-up it's gone light gray
to show that you have hidden it. I'll go through and do that for all of the
hearts. You can see the purple unicorn on the left is updating as I'm going.
When you're finished contouring, press the X to see your finished work. Now,
all those purple hearts have been removed, so only my purple unicorn is left.
If you ever want to put them back again, click on the layer that you contoured,
press the contour button again and just click the parts that you contoured out
to put them back in. But, what about if your image is only one color? Let's take
this red bear. At the moment, this is quite a wintery image because of the
snowflake that you've got in the top of the bear. Let's say we're actually making
a bear in summertime and we don't want that snowflake to appear. It's only one
layer, so we can't just hide other colors to get rid of it.
We need to use the contour tool. I'm gonna click contour again and zoom in so
I can see, and now if I click those snowflake parts and then close out of
the pop-up you can see they've been removed from the bear so it's now gone.
Contour can also be used to turn images into silhouettes. Let's take this other
bear for instance. If I click contour on him and then hide all contours, that's
going to get rid of all parts of the cutout from inside the bear. If I
close that, he's now been turned into a silhouette. If I wanted to turn on
certain parts of him again, click back into contour and then just click the
parts that you want to cut and then close. Those cut lines have been put back
on. Contour is a brilliant feature because it lets you turn images into
something different. Let's take this pattern down in the bottom right. Click
contour again and you can use this to modify patterns and turn them into
something that looks different, so I'm hiding all of these outside ones like
this and I'm also going to hide these ones around the edge and then click close. You can
see I've missed one on the top left, so I'll click back in and hit contour.
Now for some reason, this one isn't letting me click it, and when I click
it's actually weirdly hiding a different part of the design. Sometimes it can be a
little bit buggy like that, and if that happens what you can do instead is look
down the list on the right-hand side to find the bit that you want to hide.
I'm looking for that top corner, which is this one, and if I press that it will
hide it. I'm gonna right click and duplicate on this layer and then
position it right on top of the other one. For this one, I'm gonna change the
color to a purple. Now I can click my purple layer, go into contour and then
click 'hide all contours'. You'll notice that you have one thing left and that's
because you can't delete every single bit. When you click 'hide all contours' there will
always be one thing left, but that's okay for now because what I want to do is
turn on the bits that I removed from the orange version of the the pattern.
If I close that, you can see I've turned this into a two color design, so when
I make this on my Cricut machine it will cut all the purple bits that have one
color of card on one mat, and all the orange bits out of another.
I've missed that top corner again - there must be something about that top corner!
I'll just turn that on - there we go. You can use contour to create
multicolored images from your SVGs or Cricut Access images, even if they're
only in one color to start with. Pretty cool, huh? One more thing you can
do is remove parts of an image you don't want to create something completely
different. On this outdoors adventure emblem, let's say I only wanted the
hot-air balloon in the middle. How can I do that? That's right, with the contour
button! Press contour and this is zoomed in quite far, in so I'm gonna zoom out,
and then click on all of these bits to hide them. Let's do it in here it might be quicker.
Now I've just got that hot-air balloon without the writing, which might
be better suited to what I want to use the image for in my project. For this image, I
can be even cleverer and inverse the colors to create a different effect.
Again, click the layer and then contour, and you'll see on this one when it loads
you've got a circle at the top. If I contour that out, it's gonna flip the
colors to create an inverse cut effect. Now, instead of cutting out the
hot-air balloon shape from my vinyl or my cardstock, it's gonna cut all the
little bits around the edge instead to create a negative effect of the hot
balloon. But wait - what about contouring text? Well, by default, if you put some
text in Design Space and you click it, that contour button doesn't show up.
But what if you want to hide parts of text? E.g. on this one, maybe I want to fill in
the the middle of the O's. In order to contour text, you first need to weld it.
Once you've welded it, you can't edit that text any more -
so you can't click into it and change the letters or the font or anything
like that. Once it's welded, that's it - your text is
fixed. A good thing to do before you weld, just in case you want to go back and
change the text, is to right-click on the text layer and then duplicate, hide the
duplicate by clicking on the little eye, and now you know that if you
need to go back and change the text at any point such as to correct a spelling
mistake or change the font, you can. For the
one that isn't hidden, we're gonna go ahead and click the weld button down the
bottom of the screen. Now when I double click my text, I don't get that pop up
asking if I want to change the words or the font - it's just one single
un-editable image. But look! If I click it now, that contour button has magically
appeared, so now I can go in and hide the middle of those Os. This is really cool
if you want to do things like cut out shapes for the middle of letters.
Go into shapes and I'm choose a heart. Make that a bit smaller, let's
make it red - actually I think that was orange - move it to my letter and then if
I select both layers I can slice them. If I hide those, I've now got a heart
cut out of the middle of my O. If that was a little bit quick, don't
worry, I do have another video where I go through the slice tool in way more
detail. You can find a link to that one in the description below this video.
Because we contoured out the middle of those O's, it's opened up a whole new
world of things that we can do with our text and that is another reason why
contour is such a brilliant feature of Design Space. This was just a quick
overview of what the contour button in Design Space can do for you, and how you
can use it to create your own designs that are unique and perfect for every
project you're working on. If you're a member of any of the Cricut Facebook
groups, especially the larger ones, over the past couple of months you'll
probably have seen pictures of completed craft projects from other crafters where
they've made 3d layered mandalas and zentangle images using SVG's that only
actually come in one color. They've turned them into these amazing layered
designs all by themselves. Want to know how they do that? That's
right - with the contour button! If you'd like to know how to do that, then
follow the link to the video that's just popped up at the top of the screen or
look in the description below this video and I'll put a link to my other one
where I walk through how to use the contour tool to create your own layered
mandala or zentangle images using SVG's or Cricut Access images. I've also done a
full tutorial on how to create layered alphabet letters. Again, these are so
popular with the Cricut community at the moment and it's not hard to see why -
because they're so pretty! Contour plays a huge part in how
I made this letter in Design Space. If you'd like to know how to make your own
layered letters, click the link to the video that's just popped up at the
top of this one or follow the link in the description below. I'd really
recommend jumping into Design Space and having a play with a contour button on a
few different images so you can get to grips with how it works. I hope you've
enjoyed this video and that it's given you a little insight into that magical
little contour tool and everything that it can do for you. If you've enjoyed this,
please click the 'thumbs up' button below this video. For more Design Space
tutorials, subscribe to my channel as I release new Design Space videos every
week. Don't forget, there's more contour tutorial videos linked in the
description below this one and you can also click these videos to jump straight
to them. Thank you for watching!