Finessing a cut with the Cameo

Oh let's pop into the weekend with a Halloween card, lol.  Parts of this card gave me a real challenge and so thought I would share it with you.  If you are a master with your cameo, this is not going to be a big revelation but if you are an intermediate and just getting started with print n cuts this might help. As hard as it is for me to believe, I have been with the Cameo for a year, it was a big scary decision for me to switch from the Cricut to the Cameo but the end results pushed me into the decision and I just wish I had done it sooner.  I have pretty much navigated the waters on my own but would not be where I am had it not been for the "Silhouette Plus" forum, those ladies and gentlemen are amazingly talented and sharing is the backbone of this forum.

On to my challenge. I have been doing a lot of play with my miniature chalk boards as sentiment/journaling blocks.  I love the look of the chalk and the contrast from the blackboards.  One of the biggest sensitivities for the Cameo when bringing in your own work to set up for the cut is color contrast in your image.  When I first started doing cut and prints, per the advice of different tutorials on Utube, the fist thing I did when selecting my image for the trace was to turn off the high pass setting and go immediately to the threshold for my adjustment, most of the time this worked, but my cuts were not as crisp and clean as I knew they could be, so in the beginning I settled and just did a fussy cut trim if needed.  As I got braver and more accustomed to the Cameo and started reading some of the Silhouette Plus forum posts, I realized that the high pass setting could be a tremendous attribute, its primary concern is the outline area of your image.  By adjusting this setting first then shutting it off and then going to the threshold I found that my cut lines around the image were tighter and gave a cleaner cut.  Now my challenge with this block was (if you will look closely at the white line around the "boo", it is very close to the edge of the chalkboard, when the I did my selection for the cut lines it wanted to cut into the white line at the bottom right because of the white on the black.  Nothing I did would adjust this and going into the points was not working either.  So what I did on this block was create an outer offset and then filled it with a black and white pattern, grouped them and then set my cut lines, it worked perfectly. I usually don't have to work this hard to get a cut but the end result on this was a sweet victory and another trick for the bag.

The background on this is a gelli pull, the skeleton head is from my photo shot at a display store earlier this summer it was color enhanced with Copic markers.  All other elements were created using my Cameo and PS6 and coloring also done with Copic, "Bistro markers" and chalk.  Hope everyone has a safe and happy weekend. Hugs