Hi my name is Brody Budahl, I help people create beautiful wall art inside and outside of the home. I am going to show you how to take your custom art pieces and designs and bring them to life. Today I am going to illustrate in 10 steps how to make files to run them on a plasma table. Since a lot of time is spent decorating home, garage, shop etc… the plasma table makes it more custom and allows you to create your own custom art and signs.

Step 1:

Before being able to put all of the amazing ideas into a great piece of art certain steps must be followed first. First, need the website to be able to run the idea so the program to use in this certain instance is Inkscape. Inkscape can be found by looking up Inkscape projects on google or any browser of your choice and begin the downloading process. When Inkscape is first opened there will be four options to choose between; GNU/linux, windows, macOS, source archive, the right option to choose is based on the computer Inkscape is trying to be ran on so in my instance I have a Dell computer that runs windows so windows would be the correct option for me.

Step 2:

Now that the beginning process is over that might have taken a few minutes to complete, now the art begins to come alive. At the beginning I talked about what kind of art was being designed; logos, family name, business etc… this is where the design for this first project has to be selected. In my case I’m wanting a large cut out of the Lake Area Tech name and logo which is something that I already have in a picture form, this works really great with farm logos that would look really good inside of a shop. I decided on picture I like and download, downloading the image will be required to go any further in this process. Now that the idea has been selected, at the open page of Inkscape in the bottom right corner it says new document this option needs to be selected. There are many different templates in this program that work really well for designing things from scratch but just select a blank new document.

Step 3:

After new document is selected there is going to be a white tall rectangle this needs to be changed depending on what size of sign is wanted in my case this will not work, this rectangle is the size of a standard piece of paper. So, to fix this in the bottom right corner there is a arrow after selecting this select document properties. This might look over whelming but it is very straight forward, go down to custom and so that it is in our standard form click units and change it to inches instead of mm. after changing that go to the left side of that and change the numbers so either shrink or expand the box that is with the width and height, this is based around the rough size of the sign. (in addition, make sure the box is bigger than the sign.)

Step 4:

Now that the box is to an appropriate size it’s time to upload the image, going up to the left hand corner select file and under file click import which is the 10th option from the top. When import is selected its time to find wherever the image is located and where it was saved to, I prefer to save things like this to my desktop just because it is easy to find this way. After the image is found, select it and hit open which is going to bring it in the center of the white box. By clicking on the image, stretch the image by using the arrows in the corner to expand it so it fits better in the box also at the top and left side of the screen there is a rule this is telling the exact size of the image as well. Since everything is sized right it’s time to make the cut out, to do this need to select the image (selecting means clicking on) then go to the tab path at the top of the screen, under this path click trace bitmap.

Step 5:

Trace bitmap means that its going to turn the shadows white and shadows black which allows the image lines to follow when it is cut out on the plasma table. Now select trace bitmap click on update, this is going to show what it is going to look like form now on so click update and apply. Almost done one more step left and that is too select and drag the new image off of the old one so both can be seen separately sense the new image is the one wanted, select the old one and hit delete. Re center the new and improved image to the center of the box sense the new image had to be drug off of the old one. The only step now is to save and run. Now the amazing project is complete and looking amazing.