Hi, everyone! We’re bringing the holiday cheer today, with some really cool new Magic Canvas features.
It used to be that all Magic Canvas designs created engrave-only options. We heard that you wanted to cut, to score, and – of course – to continue engraving. Now, with some cutting-edge (no pun intended) new AI technology, you can!
Our new art style, Ornaments, produces vectors that can be cut, scored, or engraved. The existing art styles behave as before (and can only be engraved). Let’s take a look at the Ornament creator, just in time for the holidays…
You can turn just about any idea into a stunning handmade custom ornament that’s ready to cut.
The new art style will be rolling out over the course of the next few weeks. You don’t need to do anything to turn it on. Simply open up Magic Canvas and, when it’s available, you’ll see the new Art Style:
Then it’s time to print (and search through the house for a ribbon to hang it with). These turn out amazing on hardwood, plywood and draftboard Proofgrade materials!
Normally, I prefer to design my own stuff, but I couldn’t resist trying out this new ornament style. I must admit…the results were stellar. Adding the group name at the top was sort of an afterthought.
My youngest daughter founded a vocal group, which has now performed every year for the past 12 years at Christmastime…and I was at this year’s performance yesterday. She named the group Ad Lucem, which is Latin for 'toward the light".
For the heck of it, I used their name Ad Lucem as a prompt in MC and was delighted with the results.
I forgot to take a photo of the actual ornament which I cut out of PG cherry, but this is the design that came up…which couldn’t have been more perfect.
One more that I made after this one had no other option besides cut…which ended up cutting out a major portion of the design right in the center. Had I wanted badly enough to change it and fiddle with all the nodes, I could probably have changed some of it to score or engrave. Didn’t want to spend the time it would have taken.
I actually mispoke…sorry. It wasn’t that there wasn’t another option (cut/score) but that I wrongly assumed that like the others, I could cut the entire thing out…which I did. I can see now however that this particular design is probably not best served by being completely cut out…it’s so fragile and delicate I could breathe on it and it would break.
I also now see that had I chosen engrave or score, that it would have cut nothing out…not even the main ornament.
This particular design did have only one option available…it was all one color…and not an option for combinations. Hope that makes sense.
It makes some really pretty stuff, but my taste tends toward minimalism, and it’s a struggle to get it to cut down on some of the frippery. E.g. this “cat lying in front of the fireplace, yule log, minimal, basic design” has an awful lot of curlicues and pompoms. It’s nice though, and I did cajole some simpler things out of it too.
I’m not exactly sure what you mean. If the AI didn’t generate a hanger with a hole, you will need to make one either by downloading the file and fixing it in an external program (like I did with mine in Illustrator), or with the Premium tools, but I am not an expert in the workarounds you need to make up for not being able to weld/union shapes.
This is what it originally gave me. It probably would have worked ok, but I opted to make some small adjustments before cutting it. I deleted the outline and made a new one, because it was not perfectly round and that would haunt me in my dreams.
Enjoy!
