making Reusable text stencil's

[KDJ]

Hello Everybody, Just got Affinity Designer for Mac. I've never worked with one in my life or any other. Is there a tutorial on making sign stencil's, can it even be done with Affinity Designer?

Any help would be great, Thank you

[firstdefence]

Welcome to the forum KDJ.

• Do you want to cut these out Mylar stencil sheets?
• Do you have a cutter to do that or would this be a manual job ala sharp craft knife?

And to answer the question, yes, I'm sure its possible. The chequerboard indicates transparency.

Resuable text stencil.afdesign Saved with history so you can jog back and forth in the history panel. 

 

[KDJ]

Thank you for your reply. Yes, I have a Cricut maker to cut any stencil design. I would like to know how to bridge the center of letters/numbers so could use whatever font style I like.

I know nothing about design software programs. if anybody knows of a tutorial I could watch on my iPad and work on my Mac as I watch it being done, that would be great?

Or, if anybody has the time to tell me step by step start to Finnish that would work also.

Thanks so mush

KDJ

[gdenby]

Hi, KDJ,

I did come across a stencil making tutorial for Cricut here. 

To do something similar in Affinity, you will need to use the boolean operators, specifically, subtract and add. These can  be found in the menu "Layer/Geometry." There are also usually buttons for the operations in the upper right of the toolbar, assuming you have a basic layout for the bar.

After choosing whatever font you want, type the words/letters. Then convert them to curves. A simple way to brake them up is to select the pen tool, and in line mode, draw a thick stroke. Position that as needed where you want to brake the glyph shape. Use the command "Layer/Expand Stroke" on the pen line. The line, now named "curve," should be above the letter shape in the layer hierarchy. With both selected, use the subtract command. The pen line shape will disappear, but the letter "curves" object will remain, but with a new clean break.

After working w. many letters, you may want to group the mass of curves to make them easy to move around. Because all of the parts are distinct, they can be all "added" into a single curves object, also for easy moving and scaling.

Then daw a rectangle to represent the vinyl to be cut, position the stencil above it, and subtract.