Canvas - Manipulating Basic Shapes - Resize, Weld and Subtract

As it's December, I thought it'd be a fun introduction to Canvas to learn how to make a basic flat bauble shape with a hanging hole. This creates a simple shape that is one single pattern. Once made it can be resized, and the hanging hole is an integral part of the pattern.

We cover - choosing basic shape, duplicate, weld, subtract and resize with this one.

The end result - a bauble shape with hanging hole

so off we go, from the very start.

Step 1 - log into canvas and choose the My Projects tab (between Canvas Projects and Pattern Collection).

Step 2 - Click on the New Project icon in the top left of the My Projects screen

It should look like this when opened

Step 3 - click the arrow on the left hand list for the Basic category and scroll down until you see the circle icon. On my Canvas it is in the 10th row down, just below the pentagon (5 sides) and next to the hexagon (6 sides).

Step 4 - click the Circle icon and a standard sized circle will appear in the mat area on the right.

 Step 5 - put your cursor on the circle you have just created so that it is outlined with blue dots as above, and right click with your cursor. This brings up the Menu as a little splash screen.

 Click the Duplicate row and another circle will appear on your mat slightly overlapping with the first one.

Step 6 - if you hover your cursor in the middle of the box surrounded by blue dots, it turns to a cross with arrows at the end, hold your left mouse button down and move the mouse so the circle moves down and right so the two circles are separate.

One thing to note in the bottom left corner of the mat screen area, is a box showing the dimensions of the highlighted pattern. The standard size the circle comes at is 3.94x3.94 inches. You see that?

When you are manipulating shapes, what matters is the PROPORTION the shapes are to each other as you are building your final image so that it looks balanced, don't worry about how big they are supposed to be at the end, just make sure that they are a size that YOU find easy to handle. For example, I may want the final image to be 1" high, but I've not got the eyesight for that, so I build based on the standard size they come out, and resize at the very end.

One other thing is just above the mat screen is a row of icons - there's a % there, the mat opens at 33% standard. I use that % when creating shapes, but magnify it to 300% or so when I'm joining shapes together as it's easier to work that way. So throughout this post you'll see changes in magnification so that I can zoom in or out depending on what task I'm doing.

Step 7 - Change the size of one circle to 6 inches. To do this you can either click on the CORNER blue dot of the circle and keep an eye on the sizing in the bottom left, OR you can right click to pull up the Menu and choose PROPERTIES on the last row of the Menu. For this, I'll use the Properties because I can be more precise.

Click Properties, make sure the Keep Aspect Ratio box is ticked (so that the circle stays round and doesn't turn into an elipse), and type 6.00 into one box. Then click outside the size box (but still in the Properties area) and both boxes should register as 6" and the circle on the Mat will change size.

 Leave the Properties box open and just move it to the side so you can see all the mat and the Properties box by clicking on the Properties header and holding your left button down whilst moving the mouse.

Step 8 - There's 3 areas in the Properties box - sizing and angle, colour and finally line type.

In Colour there's two options - colour the shape (the paint can) and colour the line (the pencil).

Open the picklist for the Paint Can and choose a bright green. This fills the circle you are working on with a solid green.

Why are we using colours? The machine doesn't read colours does it? Nope, you are absolutely right, the machine ignores colours. The reason we are using colours is so that you can see exactly what Canvas does when we manipulate shapes and weld, divide, subtract and use layers etc. It helps one understand what each Function does and how it can be played with and experimented with to do fun things!

So each circle we work on will have a different colour so you can see what's happening.

Step 9 - Leaving Properties open to the side, now click on the other circle you created, up in the top left of the Mat. It is now outlined with blue dots and the properties of this second circle are what shows in the Properties box.

Remember - the Properties box shows the properties of the pattern that you have 'Active' (ie surrounded by blue dots box). I love that the Properties box can stay open and do this!

Anyway, change the size to 0.75 and the colour to a bright pink in the same way as you did above with the other circle (when you changed that one to 6" and bright green).

Step 10 - Make your shapes easy to manipulate - This is where the magnification comes in, because the blue dots all go squished together, so, as you did above, hover your cursor over the pink circle until it turns into a cross with arrows and move the pink circle closer to the green one.

Then above the Mat on the Icons line, make the magnification to a more comfortable 150 or 200% or whatever you need to so that you can SEE BOTH circles easily. (You don't need to see all of the green circle, just the top of it).

Step 11 - move your pink circle so that it's about half overlapping with the green circle. Once you are happy with the overlap (this is how we make the hanging hole), 

then put your cursor on the white of the mat, hold the mouse button down and move the mouse so that the light blue square picks up both the pink and the green circles. You don't need to cover the whole green circle, just a bit of it will pick it all up. This action means you have highlighted BOTH circles. It should look like this:

When you let go of the mouse button, the light blue box will disappear but both the pink and the green circles will have blue dotted boxes around them. You do this to apply functions from the  Edit Tab at the top above the row of icons - there's 3 tabs, Project, Edit and View.

Step 12 - Leaving the blue boxes showing on the mat, click on the Edit Tab.

This brings up a new menu with lots of different sections in it. If you hover your cursor over each icon, a little popup tells you it's name.  Third section down is the Align Section. Second Icon along is the Centre Icon it has a vertical line in the middle with a white box on top of a black box, both horizontal.

What this Centre Icon does is make sure that the pink circle is aligned along a vertical axis with your green circle. You already sorted out how high you wanted the pink circle to overlap the green circle by eye, now this button means it's centred sideways (you can't centre the pink circle for height otherwise it will just put it in the middle of the green circle).

See the top left? the Undo arrow, very useful! Have a play around to see the different ways you can align the pink circle with the green circle. There's also an undo button on the main Icon's toolbar - looks exactly the same.

Then go back to Step 11 to put the pink circle where we need it to be, and then click the Centre Icon to align it sideways.

Step 13 - Keep the Edit Tab open. Next we Weld the two circles together to turn them into one circle with a bump at the top. At the bottom of the Edit Tab is a section called Process Overlap.

The icons from left to right are Weld, Divide, Remove Overlap and Subtract. They all do different things, though some of the differences are quite subtle. In the machine itself you can Weld but not Subtract (in my machine at least), so this is an area where Canvas gives added functionality.

So. Check your two circles are still outlined in blue squares (if not go back a few steps and highlight them again). Then click the first icon in Process Overlap - the Weld button.

Your shape will go fully pink. Why? well because the pink circle was put on top of the green circle, and when Canvas welds, it see the top layer as the final layer ie it goes pink. (you can bring layers backwards and forwards using the Order Section in the row above Process Overlap, but not if you have them all highlighted, so that's for a different post).

At this point I realised that actually, the hanging bump was a bit small, and I should have used 1" rather than 0 .75" but nevermind, that's a learning thing for next time....

Step 14 - Now to add the hole in the hanging bump with Subtract.

Obviously, you need to have something to subtract with. So reduce the zoom back to 33%, and add another circle to the mat using the circle icon in the Basic shape menu in the left column of your screen (just like you did with the very first circle).

Open the Properties box and colour it Orange and resize it to 0.5"

and move the new orange circle over to near the pink bump circle and zoom back to 200% or whatever you prefer working at. (that's steps 3 to 10 above except you only need one new circle so don't do the Duplicate bit).


You should end up with your pink circle with a bump and a small orange circle like this:

 The reason you make your orange circle 0.5" is because you made the bump circle 0.75", so that means the hanging 'loop' once finished, with this 6" bauble will be 0.25" ie quarter inch deep. Which is why in retrospect I think I should have said 1" for the pink circle and 0.75" or even 0.5" for the orange circle, because when you shrink down the size to small, the hanging loop may be too thin to sustain the hanging of the bauble. Remember at the beginning I said it doesn't really matter about finished size, it's more about proportion - this is the sort of thing one needs to consider at the beginning! It looks like a pimple at present... Anyway, learning curve for us all.... Moving on....



Step 13 - Now make sure you're zoomed in well enough to do this.  Move the Orange circle so that it fits more or less evenly height wise inside the pink bump. Like this:

Here I've used the top corner blue dots to try and make it even. Obviously if I'd bothered to put the bauble bump against the mat lines so it was on a vertical and quarter inch marker proud of a horizontal line, it would have been a LOT easier to put in the right place by eye. But you know, learning curve giggle...



Step 14 - Now do the same Align as we did before when making the bump, highlight the pink and orange as in Step 10 and once both circles have the dotted blue box, click the Centre button in the Align Section of the Edit Tab.

Step 15 - Now when we got to this stage last time we Welded the two together.

If we weld this, all that will happen is that you end up with an orange circle that looks exactly like the pink one, that's because the weld function joins two positive shapes together.

We want to make a HOLE to create a hanging loop. So we use SUBTRACT.





Worth noting is that Subtracting can't be done in the machine itself. Instead you would put the orange circle (though the machine doesn't do colours, which is why it's easier to learn this stuff in Canvas) where you have on the pink circle, and instead, Group the circles. Then it becomes a Grouped Image that you can resize and the machine will cut two cutting lines, the outline of the bauble and the outline of the hole.

Oh. I hear you say, then why are we messing around with this Subtract function, if we could just Group it now here in Canvas (using the Group function in the section just above Align in the Edit Tab)?

Well, because if you subtract rather than group, you create an actual single finished pattern that you can then combine with OTHER patterns and group and ungroup those as you see fit. It adds flexibility because for example you could add stars to the bauble by grouping, or names or words for example, and if you want to resize or change the stars or names or words,  and you'd just grouped the hanging hole, you'd have to remember not to leave it behind. With subtract you have an actual bauble with hanging hole PERMANENTLY.

So, back to subtracting.

Make sure you have both your circles highlighted in blue boxes as above,

then, in the Edit Tab, pick the icon on the far right (fourth one) labelled Subtract.

What happens is the orange circle disappears and you can see the white mat behind. That's why we used colours, if you didn't use colours you wouldn't have any idea what just happened (try doing this without colours - the shapes show the white mat inside all the time and you can't tell what you've done). It should look like this - a pink bauble with a hole

And ta da!!!! You have sucessfully created a single layer image of a bauble with a hanging hole and loop. You're so smart!!!!!

Step 16 - Now SAVE it as a NEW file. Do NOT overwrite unless you know you weren't doing anything else earlier. Always do as a new file!

You do this by typing in the name of your shiny new image in the text box at the far left of the icons menu (the one that has the percentage zoom in), it has 'project title' in grey, just overwrite it,

 then click the Project Tab (next to the Edit Tab) and choose the third icon from the left in the Project section that looks like a tray with a plus sign.

Please get in the habit of using this icon, it's a nightmare if you accidentally overwrite all your hard work by just saving from the icon tool bar using the Overwrite button! It makes me cry when I do that, and I do it a lot!

This is also the place you change your Mat Size between 12 & 24 inches long for seeing what you are doing in Canvas, and you can do a shape count (different models are limited to different numbers of shapes, it's in the hundreds though) and also bring images in the various file formats into Canvas. You will see some of the icons, but not all in the main icon toolbar, so it's best to know where to find what by having a ferret around and looking at what's possible.


Once saved, you can download it as an fcm file (the only choice I have and Brother's own proprietary file type by clicking that big purple download button above the basic shapes in the left column.

You wouldn't believe how frustrated I was when I first used Canvas and couldn't find the Download button in the tool bars and menus. Doh! it's not like it's small!

Remember when you download into your computer as an fcm, you can't actually view the file in your computer, only in Canvas and the Machine itself. So it is very wise to use a saved name that you can use to identify the file - for example BasicRoundBauble or something!


Once you've saved and downloaded it to your computer/usb/via wifi to the machine (whichever you are doing) then you click the ScanNCut Canvas logo to take you back to the main screen. If you then click the My Projects Tab, you'll see your newly saved bauble as an image on a mat next to the New Project one. This is where they live in Canvas. To get into it again, click the left hand Edit Icon. To download it to the machine/computer/usb etc, click the right hand Download Icon.


And phew! we are done!

Summary of making this basic single layer shape with a hanging loop and hole

The short version of this tutorial for experienced people is:
1. Open a new project
2. Create 2 circles, resize to 6" and 0.75", colour the big one green and the little one pink.
3. Overlap the pink over the green to create the outside of the hanging loop and Weld.
4. Create a third circle, resize to 0.5" and colour orange. Move to inside the hanging loop to make the hole and Subtract.
5. Save as a new file.

See how easy it is when you have done the learning curve!!!


Next Post is - How to use Basic Shapes to make more exciting bauble shapes HERE