Crafted By Colette

For the first in this series there were a few different colouring pages I wanted to try, and different ways of getting them. I was planning on using the 0.4 black pen that came with the Cricut to draw them.

First up is this set of haunted house digital stamps from CraftStarters.

I really liked that bottom left one, but I wanted to do one with the witch as well. So I uploaded both SVGs to Design Space, sliced the witch out, and added her to the haunted house image.

Because it’s not designed to be a draw file, it drew with double lines, but I can deal with that.

As you can see, I also added two circles to the top of the page. These were for testing the ink with alcohol markers and water-based markers, so I’d know which were safe to draw with.

I had fun colouring this one, making the house look cute and Halloween-y. I reached the point where I was done with just about everything but filling in the lines…

…and I couldn’t decide if I wanted to add a sky or not. It looked awfully blank without one, but such a big patch of marker could easily be messed up – as I know well from experience. In the end I decided to go with it, and I’m glad I did.

Next up was another set of digital stamps from CraftStarters – this time adorable little monsters – almost in my own style.

I selected some of my favourite ones, and then aligned them all up neatly in Design Space.

One of them (the top middle one) wasn’t looking right and I realised I’d uploaded it as a print & cut, not a cut file. So I re-uploaded it, which is when I realised that for all of them I’d uploaded the PNGs and not the SVGs. It wasn’t that much of a big deal for such simple images, but I need to remember to keep an eye on that in the future.

For the third piece I hunted on Design Space for a Halloween colouring page and found this raven. At least this one wouldn’t have double lines. I didn’t notice however that the main rectangle was a cut line. And because my Cricut was having cutting problems at the time (which you will know about if you read yesterday’s post), it didn’t cut fully all the way round. Luckily, I have a paper trimmer. Easy fix.

Colouring this one was simple. I didn’t wanna get too complex with it, but I stuck with my Halloween palette.

The final page I did was candy corn, even though I don’t like candy corn. I’ve had this JPG on my computer for ages, and have no idea where it’s from, but I wanted to colour it.

I uploaded it, spending about half an hour clicking out all the white spaces. I sent it off to draw and it took a long time. Lots of detail. After more than an hour, with the project at 90%, my laptop battery died. The cricut just stopped. The load button was on but not flashing, so was the Cricut Go button. I’d never encountered this before, but I hoped that I once I powered the laptop back up it would restart.

It didn’t. I decided not to redraw. Instead I got my paper trimmer out and make a more abstract version.

I’d been sticking to Halloween colours so far but I just HAD to include rainbows somewhere. This seemed like the perfect opportunity. I coloured a section of each candy corn with rainbow, and then stuck to white (light grey), yellows and oranges for the rest. Once I’d finished I filled in the outlines.

When I was nearly finished colouring, I started to think about maybe colouring the background black. As I was doing the outlining I liked that idea more and more, so I did. And I LOVE how it turned out.

Tune in tomorrow for more Cricut Halloween fun.