Recently a member from one of the Facebook groups I belong to was trying to make a shadow for one of the fonts on the
Extreme Fonts cartridge. Faith was using the letter S from the Little League font. That font does have a shadow but it was a bit too chunky for what Faith was wanting.
Here's the letter with its shadow. First up, the offset size of the shadow was too wide... but more importantly Faith didn't want the black out effect.
She wanted something more like the shadow on this one...
One option was obviously to hand cut the extra bits away but I thought there had to be a better way. And I
do love a challenge.... so I set to work and here's what I came up with...
Here's a side by side to compare...
So how did I do it? Well....
I looked at the shape of the letter and wondered whether I could find some shapes that I could weld together to make my own shadow. It's all just angles after all. My first thought was to use squares and triangle from the Cricut Craft Room Basics cartridge. But then I noticed these shapes from the Extreme Fonts cartridge that Faith was using... The best thing was that the angles on these shapes match exactly the angles on the letters...
By rotating, flipping and resizing the shapes I was able to come up with my shadow.
This picture shows all the shapes I used...
I used the top layer as a guide for where to place each shape. You can see the lines on the orange piece that are the edges of the shapes I used....
It took a bit of resizing and adjusting but it worked!
This won't work for every font. In fact I haven't tried it on any rounded font. But it should work for any square font. You just have to find the right shapes to use.
So where did I use this shape?
Right here... I used the Hide Contour feature to hide one side of the brace.
This shape would have been even more useful if it didn't have a point on the left and right!
And here's the different rotations of the wedge shaped piece. Use the Flip Horizontal and Flip Vertical buttons to rotate the shape.
The square shape is resized to both create the shadow and to fill any holes left from using the other shapes.
Things to remember...
Save regularly... There's a lot of shapes on this mat that you don't want to lose when CCR freezes.... because it
will freeze....
As soon as you start welding objects in CCR your chance getting a Not Responding error skyrockets.
At that point, you have no option but to close CCR and re-open it. (Which is why you need to save often... don't rely on the Auto Save feature.)
To avoid all the Not Responding errors, I selected Don't Weld on each piece as I placed it. Once I had everything where I wanted it, then I selected Weld.
Once everything was welded I selected it all and Grouped it. This makes it so much easier when you're moving shapes around the mat.
However, if you go to Ungroup it (if you want to adjust any of the pieces) you will again get the Not Responding error. To avoid that, select the image, click the Edit Group button then go back and unweld the shapes.
See.... it really is the welding that's the problem here!!!!
At this point you can actually adjust/move the individual pieces around. You don't have to Ungroup them to do that.... But, if you do want to ungroup....
Once you've unwelded everything press the Exit button.
You can then go ahead and click the Ungroup button and you shouldn't get a Not Responding error.
One last thing to remember.... When you go to resize your finished letter make sure you resize both the orginal letter and the shadow at the same time. That way they'll stay in proportion to each other.
The easiest way to do that is to use Ctrl A to select everything on both layers. (First make sure the Show/Hide layer icon on the tabs is green..... that's the button that looks like an eye....)
Then use the bottom right arrow to resize both layers at the same time.
I have to say, this process would be so unnecessary if CCR had an automatic offset feature.... (like every other design program out there). Then we could apply a shadow (even multiple shadows) to every font and image in the Cricut library.
I think that was everything I wanted to cover.
Hope this is useful to you at some point!
(And no.... I won't do the rest of the alphabet!)
