Newbie needs help vectoring wedding invites

[cathy lynn]

Hello everyone,
I typically deal with glass engraving and am finally comfortable with the glass and laser machine. Now my Aunt is getting married and has asked me to do her invitations. I have looked everywhere and worked in Corel Draw for hours trying to figure out how to set up the image to only vector the inside of the image on the card stock. My trials continue dropping out the entire artwork, leaving a large hole in the invitation but some great designs for scrap booking. I am trying to do an invitation that resembles lace or nice script logos. I have attached two photos, this is the work I am trying to achieve, any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks you,
Cathy

Epilog Laser Mini 24
Corel Draw x4
Adobe Photoshop

[Ian Franks]

There are some ready made files here that might help you http://www.birdscards.com/free-digit...les/envelopes/

[Dan Hintz]

Cathy,

What do you need help with?

I will warn you... lacework with a flatbed (as opposed to a galvo) is a slooooow process. I did my own wedding invitations with a flatbed, and because of the speed I selected a very simple stylized heart cutout.. I went with the embedded ribbon, too (which meant a two-part invite), and I think I got the entire cutting process down to around 5 minutes per. You could easily spend 30-60 minutes per invitation with a flatbed, and that's just on the lace part. That gets tiring when you have a couple hundred invites.

You need good suction on your vector table to keep the invite in place while the air is evacuated from the machine for smoke. You need good air assist to reduce flaming and smoke damage. You can try to get away with stacking more than one invite, but I think you'll be sorely disappointed with the result. Use the laser to score fold lines... makes assembly faster, and if done right are completely invisible.

[Glen Monaghan]

Cathy,

A useful response would be easier if you posted an example of what you are doing that isn't working. I'm guessing that you likely are drawing shapes, for example flowers or vines, inside another shape that is supposed to be the rim/outline of the card, and everything is getting cut out when you wanted the lacy "skeleton" to remain. Without actually seeing what you have, I'm just guessing that you need some combination of welding, different colors to represent cuts vs scores/engraving, and working with "negative space" designs rather than "positive space".

Regarding negative space vs positive space, a positive space design has lines that define the actual objects or shapes, while a negative space design has lines that define the empty spaces in/around the actual objects or shapes. For example, to create something like your first picture, you might be drawing the outlines of flowers placed inside a curved shape representing the flap, and everything is getting cut out leaving nothing attached to the card (because you are cutting out all the flower shapes as well as the flap shape). Instead, if you example the picture, the lines that make up the design are defining the empty spaces between the flowers and flap shape, and it's just the negative/empty space that gets cut out, leaving the lacy design.

Where two shapes touch or overlap, a positive space design would show the entire outline of each and cut both apart. A simple negative space design would only show the spaces between the shapes and the eye infers the boundaries where they meet or overlap. A more complicated negative space design might make those boundaries explicit by using a second color which will only engrave/score and not cut.

Maybe the attached example will help. The red design uses overlapping ovals to create a flower inside a slightly overlapping frame. If cut, everything would fall out in little pieces. In the green version, the flower pieces have been welded together resulting in a negative space representation of the middle portion of the flower. (Although there is no longer an actual circle for the middle of the flower, our eyes perceive one based on the 3-pointed gap shapes.) If cut, the flower would remain whole but, since the outline of the flower remains intact, the flower would fall out of the frame. In the final blue version, the flower and inner frame square have been combined with "front minus back" (flower was back, frame was front), which "cut" the flower shape out of the inner frame square. When cut, this results in the desired flower shape inside an overlapping frame.

PositiveNegative.cdr

[John Pletcher]

Cathy,

I just ran 150 wedding invitations for someone who was in a bind, the contractor who was going to run them had their cricket cutter break. They sent me the art file and I did an hairline trace command in Corel and worked great. The cutout area was about 5" x 7" and took only 3 minutes per cycle with ~80 lb card stock. I also stacked three one on top of the other.IMAG0371.jpg These were run on my 50 watt Helix.

John
Iron Horse Engraving

[Rodne Gold]

Cathy,

I did my own wedding invitations

That brings back memories , I have been married round 20 years and did my own invites with a computerised engraver (ISEL) , this was in the early years/dark ages of computerised machines, I used gravoply and it took at least an hour or 2 per engraved invite (a little smaller than A5 size) , took a ton of time to do them in ACAD and another ton of time to convert em to machine instructions (I had to write my own post processor)..there were no selection of fancy fonts as well .. so had to make my own SHX baed ones..
You guys have it easy these days