Kevin Futter

Welcome aboard, Greg! Kev

Great news, Al! Kev

For personal use, you can pretty much do whatever you want. But I'd say if you've scanned a commercial decal sheet and turned it into a cutting file for masks, then it's probably best not to upload it here. If you've used it as the basis for a custom design, or used just a specific element on the sheet (like the shark mouth that you mentioned), then you can probably get away with it. Kev

Welcome aboard, Flip! Great to have you here. Kev

Welcome aboard, Jim! Hopefully you will find the site useful. Kev

Wow, that looks fantastic! Kev

Welcome aboard, Lee! Good to have you here. Kev

Looks like the pilot slammed on the brakes a little too hard! Great work, Denzil. Kev

Welcome aboard, Mark! The most popular cutter for scale modellers is probably the Silhouette Portrait, for its affordable price and compact size. Or at least, that's why I chose it! There are others out there, of course but I'm personally not familiar with those. Perhaps some of our other members can advise about those. Kev

Excellent experimentation, Max! I really would have thought that Bare Metal Foil was too thin to cut with one of these devices, but being able to certainly opens up a lot of possibilities! Kev

Price, mainly. I seem to remember that the extra features of the Cameo weren't compelling enough to justify the extra cost to me, especially as a complete beginner. The smaller footprint of the Portrait was also a consideration, given how little room I have. Kev

Wow, Midnight Black Edition! Congrats, Denzil. I considered one of these when I was deciding to purchase, but opted for the Portrait instead. Please give us a summary of your thoughts about it when you can. Kev

Lovely work, Mike! Kev

Welcome aboard, Gary! Feel free to ask any questions you might have, and we'll do our best to assist. Kev

Howdy folks, Just a quick FYI to let you know that I've just upgraded the site to the latest version of the software. As you can probably tell, it has a slightly different look, but everything should work the same as before. Enjoy! Kev

Tru, dat. Kev

Excellent work, Chris! Great results, too. I'm personally looking forward to the day where my decal use is at an absolute minimum! Kev

Thanks, Max. As it happens, I'm completely hopeless with vector drawing, so I guess we each go with our strengths! Here's the finished build: Kev

It didn't work too well with the raw scan in JPEG format, so I spent about 30 minutes cleaning it up in Photoshop, and turned it into a PNG file. This not only worked better for tracing, but had the added benefit of being imported at the correct size, whereas the 1200 DPI JPEG file came in at full size, and required a bit of mucking around to resize it accurately. Luckily it only had to be close for this build, not perfect. But for jobs that required more sizing precision, it may well be a nightmare. So, the first lesson if you're going to trace an image is to try have your source file in PNG format! Kev

I've been hacking away at this beast for the last few weeks now, in the hopes that it would help restore my mojo after a long hiatus from the bench. It's by Fantastic Plastic, in 1/144 scale, and represents a Northrop concept design for a nuclear-powered flying-wing bomber: The included decals were a bit rubbish, and both USAF decals were damaged, so I decided to finally break out my Silhouette Portrait for the first time in the more than two years since I purchased it, and make my first set of masks. I simply scanned the decals, cleaned them up in Photoshop, imported the result into Silhouette Studio, and used the trace function to give me the necessary outlines. Here's the result: I'm quite chuffed with the way they came out. It's baby steps for sure, but this was the perfect task to cut my teeth on, and I'm now looking forward to using it on other projects, and for more complicated tasks. I'll post a photo of the final result when it's ready. Kev

The few times that I've masked and painted markings, I've done it this way. It solves two potential problems: the first and most obvious that it obviates the build-up of paint inside a negative mask, and results in less ridging (you get less of that 'damming' effect). The second is that, if you're in the habit or need of using a white base layer for your masked markings, you'll get no white fringing around the finished item, as the subsequent main paint coat covers it up. Of course, Valerio may have had different reasons entirely! Kev

Very nice indeed, Valerio! Kev

Welcome aboard, Valerio! Kev

Welcome aboard, Jim! Kev

Welcome aboard, Preston! Good to hear that the word is getting around. Kev