Creating Stickers with Silhouette for a Newly Designed Graphics Lab

New Graphics Art Space!

Who doesn’t want to have a Graphics-Design Lab in their school? Porter-Gaud School recently redesigned their Fine Arts Department. One of the goals during the redesign was to integrate technology into the Arts. This meant creating a space for graphics and design. Currently in the new space, the students have access to a Carvey, two 3D printers, and two Silhouette machines. Hopefully by next year, there will be 5 more 3D printers in the lab. Even though all students in grades 1-8 have iPads and students in grades 9-12 have Macs, there are 6 computers set up for designing to occur within the lab. Therefore students can use their own devices or come in the lab to work.

How to Get Buy-In with Graphic Arts…

The question became, how do we get the art students interested in the new space? The walls were stark white with machines on tables that most of the students had never used. So, we told them it was time to decorate and that they needed to leave their mark. The goal became to teach the students how to use the Silhouette design software to create a sticker that could be put on the wall. The sticker must represent them, so they could forever leave their mark in the space.

Can you say outside your comfort zone? These art students have painted, used charcoal, created pencil drawings, and have tried just about every type of drawing that can be created. But, they had never used computer software to design or do produce art. Asking them to bring their computers to art class was the first step. The second was having them download the program and watch a demonstration. From there, the students flourished! Some students opted to create stickers showing the college they were going to attend, others chose symbols that represented something important to them while others chose to make a sticker of their own design or drawing. Hesitation became excitement and one design turned in to another and another! Students successfully learned to use the Silhouette computer program and the Silhouette Cameo machine to create the stickers…so now on to T-Shirt designs for their own drawings. The Graphics Design Lab is in full swing!

Resources for Silhouette:

Download Silhouette Software Here Software is free, but an upgraded version is available for purchase. I have used both. For this project, we used the free version and put it on the individual laptops so students could work at their own pace.

Silhouette Cameo Resources Order info and videos on use are here.

Silhouette Print and Cut Resource Site This site gives you tutorials and information on how to cut and print using the Silhouette. The options are truly endless!

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