Using Contour in Cricut Design Space

If you still feel like a beginner with Cricut Design Space, let me show you a function that helped me to start to do so much more with the projects I was designing.  Today we are going to talk about the using Contour in Cricut Design Space.

Contour is a great way to turn on and off different pieces and parts of an image.  This can open up the way you use some images.  For example, if you have an image like this one, that is just a black and white image or coloring book style image

You could just cut that black outline, like I did for this project.  For this specific example I cut it out of black iron on vinyl that was ironed onto a shirt.

Contour in Cricut Design Space for Creating Layers

But what if I wanted to use this same image, and add color to the balloons and use it on a card or scrapbook layout?  Did you know that you can use Contour in Cricut Design Space to create the colored layers for a project like this?

To start off, bring the black outline image into Cricut Design Space.  Adjust it to be the size you want your completed image to be.  Next, duplicate the image.  Click on the duplicated image and go to the lower right corner of Design Space and click on Contour.  This shows you each individual cut in this image.  You can now click on the different cuts to hide them or turn the off, thus changing the contour of the image.

If these directions do not make sense, watch this little video to see it all come together.

Now you just have to do this over and over again for each color you want on this image.  Keep going until you have something that looks like this . . .

Once I have all of the colors layered on top of each other, I like to use Contour in Cricut Design Space to turn the entire background cut to solid black, so that you get one full cut to layer all of the colors on top of. This helps so that when you stack those layers on top of each other you do not see little gaps between the layers.

More Contour in Cricut Design Space Examples

If you would like to see other examples of times I have used Contour you can check out the following posts

Creating Layers
Halloween Face Mask

I hope this helped you to learn to use the contour feature in Cricut Design Space.  There is so much you can do once you learn some of the features Cricut Design Space has to offer.

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I also have a lot of great resources on my Classes page of this website including my Teach Me Cricut Design Space Online Course. In this course I take you step by step through how to use every button and function in Design Space. I have compiled the most frequently asked Cricut questions along with the answers to those questions into one online course. This is my most in depth and detailed Cricut resource ever! It contains over two years worth of Cricut knowledge and research in one course!