FROM KITSCHY KITCHEN SIGNS TO AN R2-D2 WRAPPED VW BUS: Creative Vinyl Applications From Around the Web

Whether you’re partial to Antiques Road Show or the Star Wars saga, there are plenty of ways to express your inner muse with vinyl.

This blog post from the SignCraft website shows you step-by-step how to use vinyl to stencil mask and subsequently distress a wooden sign to reproduce the look of a vintage painted country store signboard.

Finalproduct

And here’s another idea from the other side of space and time in a galaxy far far away. Printed vinyl wrap to dress up the modular-looking proletarian Volkswagen bus as the lovable robot R2-D2, using a Mimaki printer and CorelDraw software.

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Check out these sites for inspiration, and then think about sending us your own creations for a $50 credit toward your next purchase at USCutter! More details here

BTW, all the products you’d need from mask to printable vinyl, to squeegees, to do these and any other projects, are available through the USCutter site. Check out this rocking deal on a pack of 5 McKal squeegees for $1.99 available here!

The Sign-Maker’s Guide to the Galaxy: A Handy USCutter Infographic

Vinyl products can be seen everywhere, once you know what to look for. Stickers and decals on car windows and truck fleets, ads on work vans, signs and banners of all kinds, t-shirts and all sorts of apparel. Vinyl is low cost, easy to work with, and provides consistent professional results for all sorts of crafting and decorating projects.

It can’t be a secret what makes all these wonderful vinyl products possible. USCutter sells thousands of vinyl cutters each month, many to first-time users. Our typical new user has an idea for a product or project, did their homework, googled “vinyl cutter” or found us through Ebay.

But once the vinyl cutter arrives in the mail, it may not be abundantly clear how to start making wonderful things. DON’T PANIC! Everything starts with the vinyl cutter, it’s the star of the show. But there’s a whole supporting cast of loveable materials, and each one of the players has to work together to make the whole production possible.

This USCutter infographic [printable pdf] introduces all the major actors: choosing the correct vinyl, the right application tape, and cutting blade to make any project possible, especially ones you may not even have thought had anything to do with vinyl. It’s designed to answer the question: “What do I need to make…”

Etched glass window designs… Contour-cut digital graphics for stickers… Lettering or decals for interior wall decoration… Letters and textured decals for t-shirts… Long-term outdoor signs and banners…

Clues on how to approach any job.

Your vinyl cutter makes it all possible…

Shaping Up to be a Beautiful Thing: Vinyl Cutting Applications with New Adobe Shape CC Mobile App

Cut any design in the world on your MH vinyl cutter.
Cut any design in the world on your MH vinyl cutter.

There’s a new mobile app available for iPhone and iPad users that can capture any image out in the world and convert it into a vector drawing with the touch of your screen.

For graphic designers this makes any design instantly scalable, but for our users it also makes any image available to your mobile device QUICKLY CUTTABLE.

You can download the app for free here. Simply point your device at any object (a sunset, a drawing, a screenshot, logo, or best friend) and the app draws in vector lines in real time. Hit the button and your design is raptured up into the Adobe Creative Cloud where you can access it with any Adobe suite software, from Photoshop, to Illustrator, to InDesign, and Draw.

Preview vector lines in real time then click and save for a ready-to-cut image.
Preview vector lines in real time then click and save for a ready-to-cut image.

You can edit your vector lines in the Adobe software, or quickly and easily export as a .svg into your Sure Cuts A Lot or other cutting software, and simple as that, you’re ready to cut.

With a colleague’s iPhone, a brand new MH Cutter fresh from the box, Adobe Illustrator, and provided Sure Cuts A Lot software, I was able to capture a moderately detailed drawing from my computer screen with the Adobe Shape CC app on the iPhone…

A simple demo of this app's powers.
A simple demo of this app’s powers.

It drew in the vector lines instantaneously and saved my image to the cloud. I pulled it into Illustrator and saved it as an .svg. I imported it into Sure Cuts A Lot, and was immediately cutting.

GreenStar outdoor vinyl ready to mask and apply.
GreenStar outdoor vinyl ready to mask and apply.

For experienced designers who are comfortable in the Adobe platform to new users who want to cut right out of the box without learning cutting software to anyone looking for a powerful tool that converts photos from raster to vector in real time, the process of capturing real world images for decorative vinyl applications has never been easier!