Scan drawing and open it in InkScape (File/open).Trace it neatly with a black Sharpie onto drawing paper.

Make hand drawing, outlining a shape you want to cut.Below, I am explaining it in more detail and with pictures. Tutorial for turning a hand drawing into a vector shape using bitmap traceįirst, I am just giving you the short version. They have a version for Mac over there as well.

To follow along, you can download InkScape. So I read a bunch of tutorials, did lots of trial and error and pieced it together myself. They were frequently recommended to trace their hand drawing with the Bezier tool, but who has time for that? Not me. I couldn't find a tutorial for how to do this, although I did see several people asking in forums. I made a hand drawing of a branch with leaves and used this for my first project. Illustrator probably does some fancy things that this does not do, but if you are just looking for your garden variety FREE vector program, this is really easy to use and it was easy to quickly find tips and tutorials for it as well.Īfter cutting out some stars and words, I quickly turned to the project I was the most excited about: turning a hand drawing into a vector shape. It does shapes, fonts, traces paths, turns to outline and is editable in the points and lines much like Illustrator. I have worked with it a little bit now and I have to say it will probably work for all my Cricut needs. I looked around for a free illustrator type of program and found InkScape. Did you hear it? It was the sound of my exact-o knife retiring.Īs soon as I unwrapped my machine and hooked it up, I was looking for a way to make my own shapes, turn them into vector and upload and cut them out.

If you are not familiar with it, it is a machine that can cut out words and shapes out of paper, cardstock, sticker paper, vinyl, felt, cork and other thin materials.Ĭricut has a bunch of ready to cut projects, including free ones, but when I found out that you can make your own designs, upload them to your Cricut and have it cut everything out for you, I heard this sound. For Christmas I got a cutting machine, a Cricut Explore Air bundle.

Inkscape trace bitmap still filled in