cutting in Corel for my Roland VP540

[liquidgrafix]

Hi all you experienced ones out there in vinyl land...

I'm pretty new at this game and love it to pieces. I'm slowly learning the ropes, with no one to teach me but this forum since I live in a pretty remote area.

I have one major question that I'm sure there's a simple answer to, I just can't come across it.

I do a fair number of boat graphics. Most of them are two color, either outlined with a stroke or an offset shadow. I can easily cut two copies of vinyl in the correct colors and mask them together; but it sure seems that with my VP540 I should be able to print them together and then cut them.

However, when I try to render that in Corel (X3), I cannot make the two colors into a single object in order to apply a cutline stroke. I've tried welding, converting to outline object, converting to curves. I KNOW there's a way to do this. Can anyone shed any light on this? Thanks so much in advance. You folks are more help than anyone could imagine.

And by the way, I picked up the tip on how great I45 Signs are; I sent them a job yesterday and it's already on it's way back to me. Sweet!

 

[Sports4Less]

I use a program from Smart Designer that has a create contour function in it. It is kind of an expensive program, but that function alone has saved me hours and hours. Did you try to create a boundary? Sometimes that works. If that doesn't, try the bezier tool. It takes a little longer, but you trace the outline and then change the color to cut contour. Hope this helps.

 

[liquidgrafix]

Thanks so much! I'll try that this weekend...meanwhile I'm also exploring the joys of the Contour tool and breaking apart the text. Still learning!!!

 

[Bigdawg]

Moved to Corel forum for (hopefully) some more responses... c'mon guys - my beloved Illy does it so Corel MUST!!

 

[Maverick Signs]

have you tried converting lines to objects then selecting all and go to effects/create boundary

 

[liquidgrafix]

Thanks, I'll give that a try!