Typography art question

Hello, I am trying to make a leather engraved hat patch and want the animal engraved with the text left alone that is inside the animal silhouette. I can create the image I want in Illustrator and got everything to load into glow forge. However, it comes up as two jobs, engrave the animal and either cut or ignore the letters. My questions is does anyone know the extra steps I don’t to make it one job and basically ignore the areas where there is letters?

The picture attached is another design I have but was made for me and is correct. but is for reference.

Thank You.

Bison with Text and name

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You need to make it a compound path. You can use the pathfinder tools to subtract the back. The best way to test it is to place it on a background color to make sure it is cut out.

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Bison with Text and name_v1

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That is the reference svg of a working one. The OP wanted to know how.

“If you give a man a fish , you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish , you feed him for a lifetime.”

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I know… it’s a minute work and that’s how to do it :slight_smile:

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ill work on it today, I tried last night but got to frustrated, probably gonna restart in case I clicked something dumb. Ive searched youtube endlessly but there just not what I am trying to do. Still getting used to AI.

one tip I would offer.

I have not used AI very much but I have been pounding a keyboard for many decades.

when I am working on something that is complex. I regularly save the file, and add a letter to the end.

so mastera, second revision masterb and so on.

many times I’ve figured out along the way that something went sideways and going to an earlier version beats the ever loving HELL out of starting over.

some glowforge things I’ve done that were complex I started into numbers… after finishing the alphabet.

This can be particularly useful when learning a new program. because with the brain trust around here. the HARD way you did something turns out someone else will say "well you know… " and two mouse clicks and it is done. :slight_smile:

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Here’s a quick recording of me doing something similar:

Hope that helps!

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An alternate to using the AI pathfinder tools is the Shapebuilder tool. I find it faster and more intuitive.

https://helpx.adobe.com/fi/illustrator/using/creating-shapes-shape-builder-tool.html

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Yeah the image is a bull elk. Don’t think that’s possibly with the shape builder.

It absolutely will. Shapebuilder works with any shapes and lines in AI, not just the primitives.

In your case, you’d use Shapebuilder to subtract the letter shapes from the elk shape behind them.

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