Cricut Explore Tutorial - Knockout Text Tutorial

Hi all. Back again with a new tutorial. I have had requests to do a tutorial on knockout text so here is my go at it.

This technique shows a silhouette inside a block of text. I decided to do my tutorial with the silhouette of my dog. She is an English Bull Terrier. Like Spuds McKenzie. She is too cute.

You are going to want to search for a silhouette to use. You want it to coordinate with whatever text you are going to use. I chose love my dog so I used a silhouette of an English bull terrier.

You will need to upload the image in Design Space. Use Basic Upload for this. 

Choose your image and use simple image for this.

Clean your image by using the magic wand to remove the background. This should be all you need to do. Double check your cut by clicking on the eye. It will show the red cut line. If you are happy with it, click the green button.

When you go to save, make sure to unclick the preserve original image. You should see the red cut line. If you do not unclick this button, it will keep the image and set it to print then cut. You do not want this.

You need two items for this. The silhouette and text. As you can see, I have two silhouettes. A full body and just the head. I am not sure which will work better so I will try with both.

Add text. You want a bold font. I chose Arial Black. See if your font has a bold option in the box below the fonts name. The bolder the font, the better this will turn out.

If you have more than one row of text, which you really want for this look, make sure to change the justification to center. Do not use two separate text boxes during this. Just hit enter to go to the next line. You won't be able to slice if you use more than one text box.

You need to move the letter closer together to make this work. You want as much of a solid background as you can. Do not separate the letters. You will not be able to slice. Using letter spacing, lower the numbers for both vertical and horizontal spacing. Get them as close as you can, but still separate enough to see each letter. You do not want them to overlap.

Size your text to the size you want. Then size your silhouette to fit in the words. You may have the silhouette larger than the text to make this work. You need to see what the image is in the text.

Select both the text and the silhouette and slice.

This is what it looks like once you slice. Delete the layer you don't need, which is the silhouette. You need both of the text. It is hard to describe. You will understand when you look at the image. If you delete the wrong one, don't worry. Click undo on the top of the screen.

Change the color of the silhouette to black. It really doesn't matter what colors you use, you just want to make sure the images cut separately from each other. They do need to be two different colors in your final project.

And there you go. You now have your own knockout text.

When you go to cut, do not attach. That will change it back to the same color and we do not want that. As long as you didn't separate your text, it will cut out correctly.

Here are my two knockout images. I think I like the full body better than the head. Play around until you get the look you want. You may have to enlarge the silhouette or even get a new one.

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