Silhouette UK: Creating a circular background

Thursday 25 May 2017

Creating a circular background

Hello lovely Silhouette fans! Maria here with you today with a very quick tutorial on how to create a circular background that you can use in scrapbooking or cardmaking.

Here's what you will need:

- Silhouette Cameo or Portrait
- Cardstock
- Pattern Paper
- Glue and other ancilleries to finish off your creation

Instructions

Firstly, open your Silhouette Studio software. We are going to create a random set of circles, so click on the circle tool.

If you hold your shift key on your keyboard whilst dragging the circle, you will get a perfect circle (otherwise, you will get more like an oval)

As you can see from the image above, I have done a very random design of different size circles overlapping each other. I have left blank space on the top right corner because that is where my photo and my title will go.

Next, select all the circles and copy and paste them. Move the new set of copied circles to the grey area outside the mat and leave them there for now.

Back to the circles on your mat, select them all and weld them.

They should look all funny like this:

We have pretty much finished with this. Now let's go back to the circles that we pasted in the grey area of our screen.

What we are going to do with them is resize them a bit smaller. I do this by holding the shift key in my keyboard and dragging one of the corner edges towards the centre of the design. In the image below I have circled the overall size of the design so you can see how little it changes once I've resized it.

In the image below I have already resized the circles and highlighted the new dimensions.

Now that they have been resized, I bring them to my mat (you can move the welded ones for now, or go ahead and cut them with the right settings for the material you are using, and then you are free to delete from your mat if you wish)

I want to cut each of the resized circles in pattern paper, so I arrange them on my mat so I can cut them in three clear strips. I have turned the grid lines on for now, so I can use them to guide me on my positioning of the circles.

And you are ready to cut your circles! Use the recommended settings for pattern paper.

Now you can assemble the layout, by putting the pattern paper circles on top of your welded circles. In hindsight, I wish I hadn't resized the circles so much, as there is a bit more white showing than I would have liked, although overall I am quite pleased with how this looks!