Blue Line Design

Hello from another beginner

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  I'm just a guy who retired early due to line of duty injuries and is looking to keep from loosing my mind.  Looking to learn a new hobby not steal anyone's business.  I've decided to play around making some decals and stencils for myself and family, so I came here.  I'm pretty well set on the SC2 bundle for my Mac (since I don't have any design or artistic ability so I don't believe a PC is needed?).  Hoping that since I haven't seen this in a while, you folks be willing to share me some advice to get me moving and keep me from getting too frustrated since I'm not much of a computer wiz.  Thank you in advance for your help and I really enjoy the forum. 

    Ray

Upstate NY

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Which bundle are you referring to?  Many times you will not even use a lot of the items in a bundle. You may just be better off buying the cutter , some vinyl and some transfer tape.  Then pick up a few items at a local store.  Exacto knife and other supplies.   You state your not a computer whiz, but there is a learning curve to all of this. That is why it is considered a skilled job.  Where are you getting your designs?  You stated you don't have any artist ability.  You will still need to look the design over very well and make sure they are clean for cutting. They must be vector format.  You cannot cut jpegs or any file with pixals.  Welcome. 

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Welcome from Idaho.

You will definitely have plenty to keep your mind busy. I would suggest plenty of research before pulling the trigger on a machine or bundle. Most of the stuff in my bundle (yeah I bought a bundle) were not all that helpful in the end. Some of the specialized tools sounded like something I needed but I ended up using other things. The weeding tool for instance is a little pen like tool with a ball point that is designed to help weed cut vinyl. It does work fine but I found I much prefer using a pointed pair of tweezers. The squeegee's were ok but were the budget no-name kind and were warped. I ended up just giving them away to self-installers who buy products from me and spent more on some nicer quality ones for myself. The app tape is good but usually not the right width. If you are using 15" vinyl get a 15" roll and so forth. I keep a 12" wide roll around for piece work and a 10" roll of clear for the craft moms who order stuff and want clear. Tape is expensive because it only comes in long rolls so be smart early on since you won't likely have any sales at first. (I am assuming that you even WANT sales at all)

All in all this is one of the funnest "hobbies" I have ever had and the only one that ever paid for itself and I turned it into a part time job. 

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definitely do research. buy the best cutter you can for your budget, pay no attention to bundles. Like WG said, there's a good chance you're going to end up using other things, so you might as well start using the preferred stuff from the get go. I personally use a retractable xacto pen knife, which I don't think they make the exact one I use any more - but this one come closest to it. I believe this is the version that replaced what I use - also very good.

Everything from squeegees, to tapes, methods of taping, etc. - you'll develop your own style and tools to use for it. For now, you're better off spending money on getting a better machine, over trying to get a bundle. You definitely get what you pay for, and the better the budget, the better machine, the better results.

2 hours ago, Wildgoose said:

All in all this is one of the funnest "hobbies" I have ever had and the only one that ever paid for itself and I turned it into a part time job. 

ditto!

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Id stay away from the bundles as well.  Except for their sample kit of different vinyl colors, I do suggest that.  I'm a big Amazon buyer but I have noticed that a lot of stuff I thought would be cheaper on Amazon, was actually cheaper buying from US Cutter.  

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  Thank you all for taking the time to reply.  I should have used the term "Kit" not bundle in the original post, for starters.    Based on my budget and lack of experience, I'm leaning toward the SC2 series.  I'll have to really look more closely at buying the cutter and supplies separately to get more of what I need.  I plan on doing a lot of practice cutting before I agree to make something for a friend or family member!  My goal is to make decals for local Non-profits and charities( Am. Leg, etc).  The Dept. I worked for and a neighboring Dept. both lost Officers in the Line of Duty and I'd like to offer my services to keep their memory alive as well.  

  Being totally new and only slightly skilled with both Windows and OS, other than original design work, would you favor one over the other?  Thanks for the tips and I look forward to learning from the posts on the forum!

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"In Memory Of..." decals for vehicle rear windows is a niche that you might want to start with.

images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTZfyHSnloX8m9I8U9pr5H

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I hear you're concern about getting a good looking project to give to someone. When I started out I began by doing free work for friends and family with the understanding that I was in practice mode and learning. I didn't give any vinyl away that I wasn't happy with the cut, but the install is another part of the total package that also has it's many facets. No one ver complained about getting free work and I even told them if they got tired of looking at it they needn't worry about offending me by removing it.

I don't think it will take you that long to be able to cut decent. The initial hook-up always seems to have a few headaches for some reason but once up and running, if you follow the steps and set it up properly the machine will do it's part just fine. Even the budget models are amazingly accurate machines.

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You will have more options for software with the Windows side. But chances are, you will find one cutting software, regardless of platform, and end up sticking with that.

There are not as many Mac users on this forum as there are Windows, but everyone tries to help each, regardless of platform. Both SCAL and VM have their own section on this forum should you run into any issues. Most of the cutting software function very similarly, they just call certain functions by other names, but for the most part you'll get the jist of what is being suggested.

I started out like WG - doing stuff for free for friends and family, because they didn't need to pay for my mistakes, but it was sure helpful to get feed back from them. And at some point, you just get tired of cutting the same old text or design over, and over again. So with their freebie request, it kept me on my toes and once in a while I got to challenged on how to do things differently. The biggest challenges I ran into when first starting out were, blade depth, speed, and force. Over time, you'll get the hang of it, and know when and how to adjust the settings. The one thing I do recommend is consider spending a few dollars to get a Clean Cut blade. They're worth it. I almost exclusively cut with a CC 60-degree blade.

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Thank you for the replies.   I think I’m going to go with Corel Draw and SCAL Pro.  I’ll be spending a lot of time watching Corel Draw and SCAL Tutorials since I’ve never used anything like either of them.  Should be interesting to say the least and test my limits of learning and frustration, lol.  Looking fwd to making some decals, stencils and doing some etching.  Hopefully,  down the short road, some sublimation equipment and experiments.  I’ve been looking at the posted work and the constructive comments.  I came to the right place!   Thanks again 

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CorelDraw won't run on a Mac unless your using emulation to run Windows inside your Mac like Parallels or Boot Camp.  Just an interesting note Corel recently bought Parallels.

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If you want to get your feet wet with software you can download Inkscape for free and give it a go. It's a very powerful free vector program. Vector graphics are one of the biggest hitches people new to the field have getting their head around. Understanding vector graphics is about half the battle in learning to use a cutter.

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don't make the mistake of getting the home & student version of corel draw, as it doesn't have all of the features as the full blown version

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Same with Illustrator,  the plugins won't work, with student or home version.  You may want to upgrade to a Graphtec later, and the Cutting Master plugins don't work with student or home version. 

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8 hours ago, darcshadow said:

If you want to get your feet wet with software you can download Inkscape for free and give it a go. It's a very powerful free vector program. Vector graphics are one of the biggest hitches people new to the field have getting their head around. Understanding vector graphics is about half the battle in learning to use a cutter.

Inkscape too, is much more like CorelDraw in its node editing than it is like Illustrator.  So if you are going Draw, (despite having a Mac,) practice in Inkscape translates over well.  Some people run into a few difficulties getting Inkscape running on a Mac.  Notably that it requires xquarz to be installed properly and that as Mac systems are high DPI displays, some of the gui in Inkscape might look funny.  When they start using gtk3 I think this will be fixed.  You can try a bleeding edge developer version  if you have the DPI problem with your display, as I think dev versions are built with gtk3.

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Actually with Illustrator, unless they have changed something since going to cloud based there was no such thing as a student or home version. If you got a student discount you still got the whole program and all plug-ins are good to go. I know this because I had a daughter in school and used her academic discount when I bought stand alone CS5 AI which I still use with lots of sweet plug-ins from Astute Graphics. Some of the new plug-ins will not work on my older version but enough do that it makes life pretty speedy. 

To Blue Line, If you are technically challenged I don't think I would recommend Adobe Illustrator as it's a real challenge to learn and much like a reverse polish calculator, once you get used to it all the other stuff seems really messed up. AI however IS the tool of choice for design on a mac. In fact I think it runs much more smooth on a mac than on the windows platform. Should you decide to give it a go I highly recommend finding a home study course like Lynda.com. If you can find a good one and have a few months to practice (no I'm not even kidding) Illustrator is a great program. Once learned it's about the handiest thing since indoor plumbing and you can cut the designs from Sure Cuts A Lot. I use SignCut Pro 1 which is mac OR pc compatible as my interface with the cutter. I think the SCALP program has improved since the early days and many on here have luck with it but as a design tool I think it's lacking. 

 

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2 hours ago, Wildgoose said:

To Blue Line, If you are technically challenged I don't think I would recommend Adobe Illustrator as it's a real challenge to learn and much like a reverse polish calculator, once you get used to it all the other stuff seems really messed up. AI however IS the tool of choice for design on a mac. In fact I think it runs much more smooth on a mac than on the windows platform.

Some people will advise you cutters and vector graphics are not hard.  EzPezy they will say.  I think they are on drugs.  The good stuff.  All of this is hard.  Super hard?  No.  But hard enough.  Inkscape, CorelDraw, Affinity Designer, Xara Pro, Gravit, what ever cutting software that doubles as design, and Adobe Illustrator are all a step learning curve.   I will say I find, and have anecdotal evidence from others that CorelDraw is more intuitive for those just starting.  Illustrator just swarms with options.

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It was the older products, Something about them not having Visual Basic in them. ( Maybe it was just Corel).   There was actually warnings on the Graphtec site, that you could not use it with Cutting Master.  The Plug ins wouldn't work. 

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