How to edit shapes in Silhouette Studio

A step-by-step guide to four basic features.

If you’d like to learn how to edit the elements of your designs in Silhouette Studio, this guide is for you. In today’s post, we are going to show you how to align, scale, slice, and weld the shapes of your projects with this software. Take a look and follow the steps. You’ll find out that the program is quite intuitive, and these tasks are straightforward!

 

On this article:

How to align in Silhouette Studio
How to scale in Silhouette Studio
How to slice in Silhouette Studio
How to weld in Silhouette Studio

 

How to align in Silhouette Studio

 

 

To align the elements of your design in Silhouette Studio, you need to activate a panel that is called Transform. To do it, go to the upper menu and press “Panels.” Here you’ll find the Transform panel. Once you have selected this option, a new menu will appear on the top right corner of your canvas.

 

The Transform panel has four menus: align, scale, rotate, and move. Press the first icon at the left to open the Align menu. Here you will find several options to edit the alignment and the spacing of the elements on your canvas.

 

 

The first row of the Align menu is called “Center,” and it has two different options. The left icon stands for “Center to page.” If you select the elements that you want to align and press center to the page, the composition that all those elements integrate will be placed in the center.

 

 

The icon on the right stands for “Center.” This means that, once you press it, every element that you have selected will be placed at the center of the page. If you choose this option for several items, they will be overlapped in the center of the canvas. In the image above, you can find an example of what happens.

The next option that you’ll find in the Transform panel is called “Horizontal.” It allows you to justify the elements to the left, to the center or the right. The mechanism works the same as when you are aligning text.

 

 

You also have the chance to align elements on the vertical axis. There is a third row called “Vertical.” Please note that if you select several items at a time, they will appear overlapped once you have aligned them vertically.

How to scale in Silhouette Studio

 

 

To scale your designs in Silhouette Studio, you need to open the Transform panel. Another way to do it is by pressing the representative icon on the right toolbar. It’s the one that is highlighted in blue on the image above.

Please note that you need to select the elements that you want to scale (just as we did on the picture).

 

 

Once you have clicked the icon, the Transform panel will appear. By default, when you open it, you’ll see the Align menu. To open the Scale menu, press the second icon of the higher row. 

 

 

Once you have opened the Scale menu, it should look like the one you can see on the image above.

To scale an element on Silhouette Studio, you have four options:

At the higher part of the panel, you’ll find five icons. You can see them highlighted in blue on the images above. If you press them, you’ll scale your design by different proportions.

If you want to scale your items manually, you can move the arrow on the left box. If you move the pointer to the left, the size of the element will decrease. If you move the arrow to the right, the size of the component will increase.

 

If you prefer to set this parameter at a specific value, you can delete the number that appears on the box and write the new value yourself.

Besides the number box, you’ll find two small arrows and a percentage. Every time you click the ascending arrow, line spacing will increase by 0,125 px. Every time you press the descending arrow, the space between the lines will decrease by 0,125 px.

 

 

At the end of this panel, the software gives you the option to scale your design with specific dimensions. This means that you can set a specified width or height, and the image will be modified according to it. Please note that this option can drastically change the aspect of some elements, as you can see in the image above.

How to slice in Silhouette Studio

 

To slice shapes on Silhouette Studio, you have to activate the Knife tool. It’s one at the end of the left toolbar, it’s highlighted in blue on the image above.

To slice a shape, slide the knife tool over the canvas. If you want to cut perfect, straight lines, press Shift while you use the tool over the shape. Once you’ve cut the figure, you’ll see some red lines on the new borders.

Now you have different, independent figures. This means that you can separate them as you want. If you’re going to change the figures’ color, you will have to do it separately, as seen in the right image.

 

How to weld in Silhouette Studio

 

You can make two different shapes become one by welding them. This way, they will become part of the same figure so that they won’t be independent anymore. The process is straightforward: there is no need to open any panel for this.

1. Select the two characters that you want to weld.
2. Click the right button in your mouse.
3. Select “Weld” in the options menu.

 

 

Now, both figures have become one. You can move, expand, or rotate this new figure as a unit.