This is a tutorial to introduce users to the process of creating vinyl stickers using Silhouette Studio and the corresponding Cameo printers found in the Library Makerspace. The tutorial is broken down into the following sections:
- Installing Silhouette Studio
- Silhouette Studio Introduction
- How Vinyl Stickers "Work"
- Drawing Your Own Sticker in Silhouette Studio
- Finding Stickers Online
- Cutting Your Stickers
- Applying Stickers
1. Installing Silhouette Studio
- To install Silhouette Studio, click on the following link to navigate to their software downloads website: https://www.silhouetteamerica.com/software
- Identify the “Current Version” of their software, and click the corresponding download link in accordance to your computer’s operating system (Windows or Mac)

- Save the file. Once it has finished downloading, locate and double click the file to run the installer. Follow the installer’s instructions to finalize the installation process.
2. Silhouette Studio Introduction
- What you should see:

- Explanation for each numbered section:
- Drawing Toolbar
- These are the primary tools needed to create and modify shapes and text.
- Panel Toolbar
- These panels contain tools that allow you to further modify existing shapes and images that are on the current Design workspace.
- Quick Access Toolbar
- When you select an item on the workspace, this toolbar will populate with most frequently used Panel tools.
- Navigation Tabs
- These four tabs serve different functions. For the purposes of this tutorial, we will only be needing Design, where you create and modify your files, and Send, where you send the files to a printer.
- Tutorials Tab is a good reference point for a lot of this information, as well as some other topics that this tutorial will not be covering.

3. How Vinyl stickers "work"
The biggest lesson is that lines are cut, not drawn.
- Take this smiley face as an example:

- This may be how you would typically draw a smiley face, given a pen and paper. However, this is not how vinyl cutters will interpret these lines. The software will see these lines as places to cut. Imagine using scissors, or an Exacto Knife to cut along the lines in this smiley face. While you’ll be able to remove the circular face from the rest of the paper, you won’t be able to see the eyes or mouth because it’s just a slit in the paper, no material has been removed. In order to correct this smiley face, then, we have to edit it until it looks something more like this:

- Now if you were to cut along the lines, you would end up being able to remove the eyes and mouth, thereby making the smiley visible. You can imagine using a “fill bucket” tool to see what the final sticker would look like:


- Notice how the cuts on the original one are not pronounced at all. Keep this in mind when you are drawing your own vinyl stickers
4. Drawing your own sticker
Quick Tips:
- Use the shape tools to quickly define generic shapes like squares, circles, and ovals that you can then manipulate into a shape closer to what you want.
- Use the text tool to quickly create letters and such without the need to draw them by hand. These will automatically be "bubble" letters, so you don't need to worry about the problem clarified in Step 3.
- Keyboard shortcuts are your friend, if you intend to make detailed stickers by hand, you should get acquainted with these keyboard shortcuts to expedite your creation process:
