Cutting Process

A couple of people have asked me about my creative process as I work through a cutout so I thought that I would design a project and share it with you. I have always wanted to work on a script cutout so I found this quote that was posted on a friend's Facebook page and thought it would be suitable for our purposes.

The first step for me is layout. I knew that I wanted to use a heart as the outer outline. I create a lot of my documents in PowerPoint. I simply used the Shapes tool and inserted a heart shape into a blank slide. I then started working on the quote. The most time consuming aspect for me is font selection. I have thousands of fonts available. Most of my computer storage is based on fonts. Mainly, I purchase fonts and then just upload them all. Consider it--electronic hoarding.

Once the font is chosen, I insert a text box into the slide and start adding all of the text keeping in mind the amount of space that I have available. The width of the space will determine how many words that I will be able to use at one time.

Once all of the words and phrases are done, I then start inserting the guidelines to use as connectors. The guidelines must touch the outside shape at some point--preferable at two points. Using the heart shape makes this very easy to do.

I then move the text around so that the tops or bottoms of the letters touch the guidelines in as many places as possible. When possible, to add stability to the text, I will have some text touch both the top and bottom guidelines (as illustrated in the phrase--by the good (above).

Once all of this is done, I try and find out any islands that need to be connected. For example, the "e" in hope is not connected at anything. Similarly, the word "our" is not connected any anything. I will go back with a pen and fix these problems before moving on.