UP Themed Classroom

Cricut uploading images

I am so excited to show you this project. A friend of mine wanted to do an UP themed classroom for this year, and asked me to help create some of the decorations. I was thrilled! Not only was I able to craft, but it was for a Disney project!

First I will show you the finished project, and then I will take you through the steps for making it. I made a birthday board, with the house from Up and the balloons. The entire project is laminated so that the teacher can write the names of the children who have birthdays each month on the appropriate balloon. At the end of the year the names can be wiped off so you can use it again next year.

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The two boards on either side can be used when the teacher needs to divide the class into two groups or teams. Again, these are laminated so that they can be wiped down and used over and over again.

I am going to show you a few tips and tricks for these projects in this tutorial. The first trick is how I cut the UP house image since that is not an image that can be found in Cricut Design Space.

Uploading Images from the Internet

No matter what you are making in Cricut Design Space you need an image to work with. I always like to look under the Images section in Cricut Design Space first to see if there is an image that will work for what I need. This is because I know that these will be high quality images.

If there is not an image there that works for me, my second option is always to check my favorite places that offer free svg files to find an image. After that, I start to look on the internet for an image I can use. This should only be done for personal use, since the artwork and images on the internet do not belong to you. Also, I like to look for a coloring book style image. One that is just black and white. I will often Google what I am looking for and the words coloring book page, and then look under Images on Google. Below is the image I found and used for this project.

Once you find your image, right click on it and save it to your computer in a place you can find it. I have folders for different types of images that I save to use for projects. Next we are going to upload this image to Cricut Design Space, clean it up, and save it as a cutting file.

Cricut uploading images

Uploading images

Make sure that you have the image you want to work with saved to a place you can find on your computer. Next, in Cricut Design Space click on the upload button, which I have indicated with a blue arrow in the image below.

This will take you to a new screen, which looks like the image below. This will show you the types of files you can upload. Click on the upload image button.

From here, click on the Browse button, indicated by the blue arrow in the image above. This opens a pop up window for you to find where you saved the file on your computer. Go find that image file and select it.

The next screen you will see is one that looks like the image below. There is a preview of the image you uploaded on the left. On the right, it is asking you to choose one of three options. Read through these options to help you understand what each one of them means. Basically, when you are working with an image with fewer colors, you will pick simple.

The next screen is the screen where the magic happens, so I am going to take some time to really go into that in detail in the next section. This is where you will clean up the image.

Cricut uploading images

Cleaning Up your image

In the Cricut world, you will hear people say that you have to clean up your image. What does that mean? Basically you are removing the areas that you don’t want to Cricut to cut. For example, things like the background are elements that you do not want the Cricut to cut. Let’s look at all of the sections of the clean up screen in detail following the numbered arrows in the image below.

Starting in the upper left, with the arrow marked with a number 1, you will see three small icons. The first is the Magic Wand. When you click on this icon, it allows you to remove full sections by color of your image by clicking on them. This is what I use to quickly remove sections like the background or the insides of the balloons in the image above.

The next icon is the eraser. When you click on this you can wipe over areas and erase them. You need a steady hand for this one. I like to use the magic wand first and then check if there are any spots that were missed and go back with the eraser on just those spots.

The third icon is the crop icon. This allows you to select a portion of the image and crop it. For example, in this image I do not plan to use the balloons. I just want the image of the house because I am going to use different images for the balloons. I can use the crop tool to select a window around the house and remove the balloons.

Cricut uploading images

Advanced, Undo, Zoom and Preview

Now let’s look at the Advanced button that is indicated by the blue arrow with the number 2 in in. When you click Advanced, it gives you some options that have to do with the colors in the image. Since this image only has two colors in it, black and white, I am going to change the top number to 2 so that it will only look for those two colors. This helps to smooth out lines and not have those shades of gray that sometimes feather out from the black line. It is basically helping to make your black line crisper.

Next up, the buttons by the arrow with the number 3 in it. If you ever do something in the clean up screen that you then realize you did not want to do, click that very first arrow by the number 3 arrow. That is the undo button. If you click that and realize that was not the correct choice, the next button over is the redo button. The last two buttons are the zoom in and out buttons. I use these a lot when I need to zoom in on the image to remove smaller sections.

Last but not least is the Preview button, indicated by the blue arrow with the number 4 in it, at the bottom of the screen. I use this often while I am cleaning up an image. This gives me a preview of how the image will cut. When you think you are done removing sections and cleaning things up, click the preview button to check and make sure that you did not miss any sections.

Now that you know what all of the buttons in the clean up screen do, let’s use the on this image of the UP house for our UP themed classroom.

Cricut uploading images

Cleaning up the UP house

Starting with the cropping tool, let’s crop the image down so we are just working with the house.

Next, I will use the magic wand to remove the background. I also used Advanced and changed the number to two. You can see that when you click on the background it changes from white to a checkerboard. This checkerboard tells you that this area is transparent. It is like it is invisible and not even there.

Let’s click on the preview and see what our image looks like so far. You can see in the following image, that it is only going to cut the outside edge of the house, because so far all we have done is remove the background. Click the Hide Preview button at the bottom of the screen and lets keep going on cleaning this image up.

Let’s go back to the magic wand, and start to click on all of the white areas inside of the house. Keep going until you have removed each little pieces. All you should have left are the black outlines of the sections of the house. Remember to use the zoom to get in close if you need to. You don’t want to accidentally click on the black lines.

Let’s hit preview again and see how it looks.

You can see now that it is going to cut out each section that we need for this house. Once it is cut we will put it back together like a puzzle. More on tat later. We still need to get rid of those strings coming out of the chimney.

Now we will use the eraser tool. When you click on that, your cursor image changes to a circle. Think of this circle as the head of an eraser on a pencil. You will not move that around on the image right over the top of the string lines coming out of the chimney to erase them. If you want to make your eraser circle smaller or larger, you can change the size with the slider tool on the left side of the this screen.

Go slow with this process. Zoom in if needed. the above image shows you how my house looked after I had all of the strings erased. I would hit preview again just to make sure you like how things look. If you are happy with the clean up process, click the big green button in the lower right part of this screen. When you do that, the screen in the image below will show up.

Cricut uploading images

THIS PART IS IMPORTANT

This next step is where I have seen so many people go wrong, and that is why I want to really stress the correct way to save this image. There are two previews on this screen. The one on the left says save it like this to make your image a Print then Cut image. I am not going to go into what a Print then Cut image is here, since I have a full tutorial just on that topic. Click HERE to read about Print then Cut. That is not what we want for this project.

We are going to want to click on the second preview, which says save as cut file underneath it. Once you click on that second preview you will see a green outline around it. You can fill out the information on the right side of the screen to help you search for the image later on in Design Space. At the very least, I would change the name of the image file to something you will remember. Once you do that, you can click the big green button in the lower right corner to continue on to the next screen.

In this last screen, you can see your uploaded cleaned up and saved image. I am pointing to it with a big blue arrow in the image above. Click on it and click the green Insert button to bring the image into Cricut Design Space. That’s it! You have now uploaded, cleaned up and saved an image as a cut file in Cricut Design Space! If you want to see a video on this process, with a different image, you can click HERE.

Cricut uploading ima

Next up – Creating Layers

That was a lot for one blog post. Thanks for sticking with me until the end! I wanted to be this detailed so that I don’t leave anything out. The next step in the process for this project is going to be creating the colored layers. If you need a break or a fresh cup of coffee, do that now. If you are ready to jump right in and start building the colored layer you can click HERE.

To see all of the steps for my UP Classroom Project Tutorials follow the links below
Uploading and Cleaning up an Image
Using Contour to Create Layers
Slice Extra Large Images
Assemble Larger Than Mat Projects