Making Mock Ups in Silhouette Studio®

Mock ups are a great way to envisage your final product before you start cutting and making.  I use them as part of my design process, but they are especially useful for sellers.  When working with clients, custom designs can be honed and agreed upfront.  Time and materials can also be saved by using mock ups to illustrate alternative colours / patterns when listing your products on selling sites.

Step ONE: Blank Stock Photo

Take a photo of your blank product, staged in the way you normally would if it were completed.  A nice and bright photo taken straight on without shadows or creases works best.

Alternatively you could do as I did in the photos above and take existing photos of completed pieces and use inpainting / object removal tool in your photo editing software instead.  As my picture frame was taken at an angle, I also used the perspective tool to make it square again.

Top tip
Whilst it is possible to buy pre made mock up photos, but I recommend using your own.  Your own photos are free and uniquely styled. Importantly from a business perspective, you own the commercial rights and they is a true representation of your product and commercial ones are not permitted on some selling sites such as Etsy.

Step TWO: Open in Silhouette Studio® and Position Your Design

Your photo will likely open very large in Silhouette Studio®, so use the Scale window to resize.  Position your design on top, rotating if needed.  You can turn off the zigzag line under words by selecting Spelling from the right-click menu.  Either add that word to your dictionary, or turn off automatic spell checking entirely in the advanced menu.

Step THREE: Photos of your Materials

You can of course colour your designs with a flat colour fill, but I find using a photograph of the media you are using brings the mock up to life.  For my example, I took a photograph of my Liberty fabric and pearlescent paper.  I also used a glitter digital paper from a pack I bought as I couldn't capture the glitter HTV well at all!

Step FOUR: Drag Materials Photos into Designs

All versions of Silhouette Studio®, including the Basic Edition allow you to fill your shapes with a photo pattern simply by dragging the image and dropping into the shape.  Depending on the fill you are using, it sometimes helps to set the transparency (bottom of the Fill Colour menu) to around 15%.

The Colorize tool in the Shader Effects window allows you to change the colour whilst keeping any lovely texture and reflections in your pattern fill.  For papercuts, the Shadow Window is a fab interactive tool to portray the shadow that the paper would be making in a 3D box frame.  This is exclusive to Silhouette Studio® Designer Edition.

Step SIX: Exporting the Mock Up as a JPEG

The easiest way to do this is simply take a screen grab.  I have a PC laptop and use the free Snipping Tool that comes pre-installed with Windows.  For MAC, the same idea is available when you press Shift-Command-4.

The resolution for a screen grab can be low, so if you'd like a high resolution mock up, I recommend using a virtual printer which creates a file rather than physical print out.  Kay over at Clever Someday has a great tutorial and recommendations for virtual printer software.

FINISHED PRODUCT

Here are some mock ups that I have made with the real life, alongside the finished version for comparison.

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