hi guys if you're new here I'm tauren an illustrator based in Australia who enjoys
all things art and a good plan in today's video I'm going to show you how I turn a
plain Journal cover into something a bit smash using the qriket maker 3.
so I've offered a range of journals over the past year or two that I'm still really happy with and
still using today actually but the two that sold the best were these two digitally printed covers
one was inspired by Australia using the pink gala on a banksia which are both Natives and
the other was inspired by South Korea using their national animal and flower on the cover
the other Journal I created was just a plain gray one so that it was a bit more minimal and neutral
for people who preferred that over the detailed ones I've sold out of the South Korea ones and
have only a few left of the Australia ones but I have plenty of the gray ones remaining so I
wanted to show you something that you might want to try if you wanted to add a little
something extra to your own plain based Journal a few months ago I painted the front of my gray
Journal so that I could distinguish it from the other one I had used already and also because I
was just bored of looking at it a lot of you loved what I created and so I thought this
might be of interest to you too and if you aren't into painting yourself or don't have the time to
dedicate to that part this might be a quicker option to customize it using vinyl stickers
so I started by having a think about the colors I wanted to use on the front of the journal I
went through some of the Cricut vinyls that I already had and a couple that Cricket sent
me to try then was thinking about what design I could do to really make the cover Pop I thought
about white and pastel colors looking the best against the gray and whether I should cover the
gold elephant icon or try to work around it like last time and then I was starting
to feel overwhelmed with ideas so I just stopped decided to clear my head and took
Theo out for a little wonder which always helps especially when the weather is fine questions
after that nice walk I was able to collect my thoughts up and I sat down to start planning
my day then when I opened up my journal I thought about how happy I was doing
the inside covers of my last two journals this year then the light bulb moment just came to me
all these elements just started to inspire me and I had a bit of a light bulb moment
um and thought I could do sticker sheets that relate to the inside covers of both
of my journals from this year and create them to cover the front of the other Journal
I wanted to start with the inside cover of my current Journal which is this origami girl
I'm really excited and I'm going to get started
so now I've got my inspiration I make a cup of tea and get set up at my desk to get started
so the first thing I need to do is create the artwork for the sticker sheet which
means either by hand and scanning it in or digitally drawing them from scratch or going
for something in between which is what I'm doing here I've scanned in my journal covers
and begun to clean them up in Photoshop I also wanted them to retain some of their
hand-drawn feel but tweaking the bits I wasn't really happy with thank you foreign
foreign
once I have all my artwork elements all drawn out I just need to move them into a size and layout
that can be easily printed across one sheet I've decided to go for an A5 sticker sheet so that I
can get all the elements at full size on there plus a few additional decorative stickers too
now this part you can do in qriket but I did mine in Adobe Photoshop as I'm just more used
to the Adobe software but qriket has a really easy program that comes with the machine that
makes it just super easy to grab elements around and shuffle them into the right layout so nesting
I'd already done but if you use Cricut design space you can get the job done just as fast
so like I mentioned Cricut has a great software tool that comes with the machine it's got
thousands of projects already created for you and you can just use those or you can create
it from scratch like I'm doing you can build it directly in the software using their fonts or
Graphics that they've got already in there some of them you do have to buy but they're pretty
cheap actually and what I found really good is that you can also use the free fonts that are
already on your computer or online if you find something online and just run those from the
system menu option instead you can access all those fonts and cut from those I found heaps
of cute Graphics that you could use already made quotes too so a very handy thing to have so now
I'm going to load my artworks into the qriket design space software like this onto the canvas
I have saved my sticker layout as a PNG in Photoshop that is about A5 size
and then when I bring that into the Cricut design space I just make sure it's selected as
a print then cut image and then I've also created a separate file that just has the cut lines on it
so that's the shapes that surround each of the little graphics on my layout and then when I'm
importing that one I just make sure that it's a cut only image and then once they're on the canvas
I can just resize them for some reason they come in at very odd sizes so I'll just correct that
I'm making them 6.75 inches which is the max print and cut size and then I'm rotating it to be on its
side so that I can duplicate these two layers to create two sticker sheets on the one letter sized
printable adhesive sheet I can then toggle on and off between the top layer and the bottom layer and
that'll just make sure that it's aligned I already know it is because I've done that previously in
my Photoshop but it's sometimes a little bit of a guesstimation because there's no opacity
in qriket design space which kind of annoys me I just wish they had a transparency setting so you
could see through your artwork onto the cut layer but yeah now it's all set up I am ready to print
now I will say it is not something that I did in one take and it was perfect unfortunately it did
take some getting used to I'm new at qriket and new at doing this myself and it's actually a new
printer as well so the whole thing was all a new experience and it wasn't without its frustrations
it wasn't printing properly on the paper for some reason whenever I printed directly from
Cricut design space it was automatically scaling everything down even though it said no scaling so
watch out for that one the way around this is you just save it as a PDF print to PDF instead
of printing directly from Cricut so that really really helped me and so once I had my PDF saved
that's when I could print directly from acrobat and then it didn't scale it and it was perfect
I was able to put it into the machine and then cut around it and I also calibrated my Cricut
to my print settings as well just to get it nice and clear and cuts on the lines that you want it
to cut so definitely recommend calibration and saving as a PDF and then I can press print and
print it directly onto my adhesive vinyl sticker sheet paper which is letter sized
and now it's time to cut the stickers using my Cricut maker 3 which I want to say a big thank
you to qriket for sending to me I've been dying to start using one of these and now that I have it I
keep thinking of projects I'd like to work on this particular machine can cut through materials like
card vinyl fabric leather and even balsa wood so I really want to give those kind of projects a whirl
down the track too but today I'm just going to be cutting through adhesive sticker paper and vinyl
so the cutting mode material that I want to go for is one called sticky note and this means it'll
be a kiss cut sticker sheet and then I change the pressure to less because I found that the default
one did slice through the base of my sticker sheet the first couple of times so on the third one I
got it right and just chose less pressure so this just works for my machine and my material maybe
just have a little play yourselves with your own machine to see what's right here but I think this
one is pretty good so I won't go into too much detail about how this all works there's plenty
of tutorials out there I can make one if you guys want me to but yeah I'm basically just following
the guides and sticking the corners of my paper at the top left corner and loading it into the
machine and the Machine will do the rest it is so satisfying to sit there watching vinyl being
cut I really enjoy it which is I don't know kind of random let me know if I'm not alone there but
yeah once I had the sticker sheet all correctly cut I decided I wanted to add a little bit of a
white sort of Archway in behind her on the cover so when I'm sticking the elements onto my cover
I just wanted to have a nice solid background to cover over the gold emblem on the notebook
so I just made that in qriket design space directly just using a couple of the shapes there
it was just a square and a circle joined together at the top just merged the two together so they're
one shape to be cut so then that Arch I just cut directly onto some premium permanent vinyl
in the white shade and that one was nice and easy because you don't have to worry about
any lineups you can just cut a little chunk off vinyl pop it onto the mat and cut away oh and the
only difference with cutting this one is I just changed the material to Smart vinyl permanent
so now that's all the cutting I needed to do for this little project I didn't get around to doing
the second lot of stickers this time I've had a lot of personal things going on and just didn't
get the chance to get onto that second stick of sheet but I did make this one and it is available
for you guys to print and cut yourself through Cricut design space so if you want to find that
I will leave a link down in the description box if you wanted to if you have a Cricut and you
could you wanted to print and cut these yourself you could also do them without a Cricut I guess
and just hand cut around them but I'll leave that up to you the the option is there for you
in qriket science space now it's time to decorate my journal using these stickers which I was dying
to get onto because this whole process actually took me quite a long time it wasn't intended to
be that that hard but just things weren't going my way on the day that I tried to create this so just
a lot of issues kept popping up so I was mighty frustrated by this time so it felt really good to
finally have all the bits and pieces ready for me to create a nice little front cover on my journal
I'm really happy with how the stickers turned out and unfortunately I didn't get around to
cutting the name of this journal in vinyl that was my intention as well but I just lost lost
time this this couple of weeks just gone and I was ready to just write it by hand and I also
had these awesome markers that I showed last week's video um which were the artex acrylic
markers and they actually worked really well on the vinyl anyway so I ended up using those
to just decorate a little bit further but yeah I'll leave you with the process of me decorating
this with some music I will say goodbye here a big thank you to Cricket for sending me the
maker 3 I really appreciate that and I hope you guys learned a little bit or found this useful
in some way so thank you so much for watching once again I hope you enjoyed this video and I
hope you have a great day or night wherever you are and we'll see you again next time bye bye
foreign
thank you