I've turned my wall into a giant coloring book!
Over the next 15 minutes,
I'll take you through my entire process from idea and design concept to individualy
sticking every piece of this huge piece of art on my studio wall.
It's taken three full days and it pushed me to my limit.
Oh no!
But the end result was totally worth it so keep watching to check it out.
So a few months ago,
I gave this space a makeover and the result is what you see now.
But I did say at the time that I also
wanted to add some decals to really make it look like a bit of a coloring book.
So today we're going to make that happen and I'm going to be using the Cricut
Maker that was given to me by Cricut Australia.
And because I can't help myself,
I also had some of the little creative changes that I wanted to make.
So let's walk through those together.
So the first part of my process is just thinking through what I want to change.
I really want to add some decals just around some of these artwork up here
around some of these things here and around some of these artwork here.
Now, this clock I love because it is colorful, but I do have another clock
that has been sitting on the floor in this studio for a very long time.
And I'm thinking about doing a switch.
So this is a very special clock that I bought many years ago from Italy.
It is actually handmade in Italy.
Let's just try this now.
What do you think, Shane? (Shane: Looks good)
I have to move this.
I'll probably add some little details around our little camera here.
I also feel like we need to do something creative coming off the ukulele.
And as much as Shane, I know you don't like things on angles.
I think we need to just....
I think we're going with the angle
and then we can have something kind of come off here and I don't know,
It's going to really annoy some people,
so since we're now embracing angles, let's just adjust this one to this way.
We're going to need more people
to subscribe, because I think I might have some unsubscribes from all my
un-straight pictures now.
Well, that changes things!
Now that I've made some changes to my layout, I've taken a quick photo of my new
wall and brought it on my computer with some quick Photoshop tricks.
I can see what any design will look like
in front or behind the items on my wall, and I can start drawing some new ideas.
I'm using Adobe Illustrator for my drawing today, doing some on the computer version,
using the designs I already use on this channel, and I'm using Illustrator
on the iPad to draw some new elements that work around the items on my wall.
Because I'm such a visual person,
I really like this approach to designing something like this, it allows me to see
exactly how it is going to look and plan out every small thing.
The one thing I need to keep in mind here
is that whatever I draw, I have to be able to recreate with vinyl.
So I think I went a little overboard, but I'm kind of liking it.
So this is going to be incredibly ambitious because I actually have no idea
how we're going to figure this out from here.
But I've never been one to back down from a challenge,
so first I measured a few frames and used them to work out the scale of the artwork
in Illustrator and made it to the size that I'd want it to print in real life.
Then I wanted to do a test print run of a few elements to see if they printed
the size that I expected. Since my scale was correct,
the next job is to prepare my designs for cutting the vinyl because I really
want to get the most out of every piece of vinyl and waste as little as possible,
I am turning my artwork into a bit of a puzzle.
I'm rearranging the elements onto a series
of squares that are the size of my Cricut mats.
So I use as little vinyl as I need.
I like puzzles, so I'm not too worried about putting this back together later.
Some of my lines and areas are so big
that they don't fit on a single cutting mat.
So I've broken them up into sections and will piece them back together later.
My biggest concern at this point is that Cricut Australia have only given me one
roll of the black removable matte vinyl that I'm hoping to use here,
so I'm not sure how much I'm going to get out of that roll.
So my Cricut mat is basically 30
centimeters by 30 centimeters or 12 inches by 12 inches.
And I've got my 12 designs.
So this roll of vinyl is 12 inches by 48 inches.
So it will do four.
Yep. Need more vinyl.
Shane very generously offered to make
the 40 minute drive to our closest craft store.
So while he does that,
I've printed up a full scale paper mock up of our wall design.
If I'm going to be doing a giant vinyl
puzzle, I want to be sure of where everything is going.
This has already taken the whole day and I haven't even started cutting the vinyl,
but the mock up wall is done, so we're calling it a night and I'll get the Cricut
Maker started first thing in the morning.
So it's day two.
We we're wokrn up at 5AM by our youngest.
It's raining outside. Our main studio light is broken.
And we have a lot of vinyl to cut out.
I think I need a coffee.
Shane was able to find just two rolls of vinyl at the craft shop yesterday,
giving us no spare vinyl or backup plan if something goes wrong.
The next closest craft shop is an hour in the opposite direction.
So we really don't have room for any mistakes today.
Oh, No!
So to bring this into the Cricut Design
Space, I've started a new empty canvas and I am going to upload.
I've already exported all of my mixed up
puzzle designs as PNG files so I can easily import these into the Cricut Design Space
because it's just black and white,
I'm selecting simple and then I'm just going to use the little
magic eraser to get rid of any extra white sections.
You'll notice on my screen,
I've also added some very tiny little black boxes in the corners,
it's to make sure that it recognizes the edges of my canvas.
So I've created my own little markers on the edge of every canvas so
they're all exactly the same size.
I probably could have just made these transparent and Illustrator, but
that's allright.
It's fairly easy to do it straight in Cricut as well.
Now that I've selected everything I'm pressing continue and we're going
to select cut image because we don't want to print anything, we're just cutting.
Now, when you insert your image, you notice it comes in huge.
So we do need to resize it.
I designed my artwork as 30 centimeters,
but I didn't account for the margin that Cricut Design Space adds.
So the cutting area is actually only 29.21 centimeters.
So instead of redesigning everything,
I'm just going to downsize it slightly because those few millimeters shouldn't
make a noticeable difference on such a big wall.
I've also just moved it to the very top left edge because I really want to make
use of every corner of this vinyl and then we're going to click make it.
Now, I've selected more pressure because I
really don't have any room to make a mistake here.
So I'd rather it cut slightly too deep
than not cut deep enough because I don't have any spare vinyl.
Since the first sheet of vinyl seems
to have cut well, I'm going to go ahead with weeding out all the little pieces
while I set up my Cricut maker to start on the next piece of vinyl.
I'm definitely thankful that Cricut sent me one of these handy little wedding tools
because it is making the process so much faster and it's actually a little bit fun.
Because my designs are so big,
there's a lot of extra vinyl in the gaps and around the edges,
so I've decided to try saving some of it in case I need it to create any extra
shapes or lines to fill in the gaps in my wall.
I can't imagine I'll be able to use these in the Cricut Maker again,
but I could use scissors or Stanley knife or even a hole punch to make decals
from them to add to this wall or for later project.
So it's better to keep them aside instead of just wasting them.
So that was actually quicker than I expected it to be,
which is really good because I thought I was going to be weeding all day.
But now I have this box full of all of our
puzzle pieces that I need to work out where they go.
It's a good thing I like puzzles.
So I've got my pieces, I've got my transfer tape,
and we're going to put it all together and we're just going to see how we go
piece by piece, getting this onto the wall.
Oh, no!
Noooooo!
You stupid paper, why would you move?
Nooooo
no no no no no!
Oh, no.
Why?
Oh, why?
Paper, why would you do this to me?
We were so close to getting on the wall!
Why would you do that?
Why did you jump off the wall?
Oh, no.
No!
I barely touched it and it stuck really well.
I would not be panicking so much if we had, like just just one extra sheet
of vinyl, but if we have to reprint this, it's like an hour drive.
I'm not really sure about this.
Well, that was more than enough excitement for one day.
Let's try this again.
This is where it's going to go.
Oh,
that was way too high pressure.
Oh, no. How many more have we got to do?
I should have probably created some kind of number system or something to tell me
which ones go where, but I have managed to piece together one
one section
so far.
So this took a little longer than planned and day two became day three,
but day three run much smoother and I found my groove. Just like every puzzle,
the process of elimination meant eventually finding matches to all those obscure
shaped lines and random pieces. I was able to use the same transfer tape
over and over, which saved a lot of tape in the long run.
So I didn't even use the whole roll in this entire project.
Considering where I started,
I'm finally starting to feel confident
about this project and I'm getting really excited to see it come to life.
After three long days, the wall is finally done,
the wall is looking better than I could have imagined, the floor, not so much.
I didn't make too many changes from the original design.
And I'll eventually think about adding some more decals to wrap around
the corner and onto the sidewall here when I can get some more vinyl.
If you enjoyed this video.
Please leave a like and subscribe to my channel.
Then check out one of these videos to watch next.
(Zac: Oh, can I use these textas, Mom?)
Oh no, not those ones. Those are mine.