Artwork that works

Everything downstream depends on one thing: the studio has to be able to tell ink from paper. It traces the boundary between the two and cuts along it. So the artwork that works best is flat black on flat white — bold, closed shapes, no shading, no grey.

If you are generating the picture

Having trouble coming up with a prompt? Choose one of the templates above the prompt box, each a worked prompt with the layer settings that suit it. The Category list above the cards narrows them to one kind: mandalas, symmetrical florals, wildlife, geometric, Art Nouveau, the twelve signs of the zodiac, Christmas, Halloween, Easter, Thanksgiving, Day of the Dead, Lunar New Year, the other holidays, weddings, new babies, Christian designs and more. It fills in the prompt and the look; you still press Generate Source, and the actual image generated will be uniquely different. A Make it yours field swaps the one phrase that matters (“owl” for “fox”) everywhere in the prompt, and you can edit the rest like any prompt. A template goes into the project that is open. If that project already has its artwork, the card asks first: Start a new project with it leaves the open project exactly as it is, and Replace this project's prompt puts the template's prompt and settings in place of the project's — the two are not combined, so the next artwork you generate is the template's design with nothing of the old one in it. The artwork stays until you generate again, and so does its cleaned mask, with anything you painted on it. To add something to a design, type it into that project's prompt rather than choosing a template.

Want a whole design rather than a prompt? Finished designs, in the bar at the top, opens one we built and perfected as a project of your own, picture and settings included, ready to build.

Describe the subject plainly and let the style presets do the rest. “A lotus mandala with eight petals” works better than a paragraph. The presets under Art direction already ask for the flat, closed line work that cuts well, so you rarely need to say so yourself.

Every control below changes what is asked of the image model, so every one of them only affects the next picture you generate. Changing them does not alter a picture you already have — whatever was drawn is what gets cut.

Detail level

How busy the design is — how many openings it asks for.

• Low — roughly 10 to 18 openings, each a big simple shape.
• Medium — roughly 18 to 30. A balanced amount of ornament.
• High — rich ornament, the default.
• Extreme — as dense as the model will draw.

Style preset

The overall look. Twelve of them, and they differ more than any other control on this page — this is the one worth trying two or three of before settling.

• Organic Mandala — petals, lotus lobes and teardrops in concentric bands. The busiest, leafiest look, and the default.
• Brush & Gouge — long tapering strokes like a lino-cut. Bold flowing lines, no foliage.
• Stained Glass — heavy leading around large simple panes. Few cuts, strong shapes, and the most forgiving to cut.
• Art Deco — sunbursts, chevrons and stepped symmetry. Crisp and machine-made.
• Floral — petals, leaves and rosettes.
• Geometric — lattices, concentric bands and repeating facets.
• Art Nouveau — long tapering whiplash curves.
• Celtic — interlaced woven bars and knotwork rhythm.
• Minimal — a few large, confident negative spaces.
• Highly Intricate — dense fine ornament. Check it against your minimum feature size before cutting.
• Nature — branching veins and organic growth.
• Abstract Layered — contour-parallel bands that echo the silhouette.

Style notes

Free text sent to the image model on top of the preset, and it takes precedence where the two disagree. Use it for what the presets do not cover: “thick continuous ribbon lines of even weight”, “no leaf or petal shapes”.

This is the escape hatch when no preset is quite right. It affects the next Generate Source only, not Rebuild Layers.

Symmetry

How regular the composition is asked to be.

• None — ornament follows the artwork only.
• Subtle — partial mirroring about the centre.
• Strong — mirrored and rotationally repeated. Makes a mandala look deliberate rather than approximate.

This asks the model for symmetry. Make symmetry exact, in Build quality, is a different thing: it corrects what was actually drawn, for free, after the fact. The two work well together.

Picture

The shape of the picture the model draws: Rectangle – portrait (tall), Rectangle – landscape (wide) or Square. It is written into the prompt, so choose it before you generate, and it is the one choice here that changes the price: a square picture is one price and a rectangle, tall or wide, is another. The panel shows both. Square suits mandalas, wreaths and anything round; tall a figure, a guitar, a tree or a bird with raised wings; wide a scene or an animal lying down. A tall subject in a square picture comes back small, with blank space down the sides.

The picture always comes back as a rectangle or a square, whatever the finished piece will be. The shape of the piece is its border — Frame, Open frame, Circle or Outline — which is chosen afterwards, under layer settings, and changes nothing about the picture. Rebuilding after changing the border is free.

Fill

What the model is asked to draw inside the picture, also chosen before you generate:

• Whole design, nothing cut off, the default: the design drawn complete on white with a margin all round. Every border suits it. The Outline border cuts round it, so a tall picture of a phoenix becomes a piece shaped like the phoenix; Frame and Circle hold it with plain wood around it, and Open frame holds it in a frame with the space around it cut away.
• Edge to edge: a panel filled corner to corner, the subject at its heart and ornament in the surround. It suits the Frame border. An Outline round a picture filled to its corners is the rectangle, an Open frame has no background to open and builds as a Frame, and a Circle cuts its corners away.

Fill does not change the price.

Around the design

Shown only with Whole design, nothing cut off, and like Fill it is written into the prompt, so choose it before you generate:

• Plain, the default: plain white round the design.
• Patterned border: a band of pattern in the design's own style runs round the edge of the picture, with the design complete inside it and clear space between the two. The design is drawn a little smaller to leave room.

The border is wood, and it goes all the way round, so the white between it and the design is an opening like any other: it is cut, and the design stands inside it. What holds the design there is Island policy, under layer settings. Auto bridge tabs it to the border, so every sheet stays one piece. Allow separate piece leaves it loose, to be glued down onto the sheet behind. Remove problem feature does not cut that space at all, so the design sits on solid wood inside the border; the border's own pattern is still cut.

The border suits the Frame border best. An Open frame or an Outline finds the design already reaching the edges of the picture and builds as the rectangle, much as a Frame would; a Circle is drawn round the whole picture, border included, so the band ends up as a square inside the circle. Around the design does not change the price.

Black / white

How much of the drawing should be black, which is the material. Left asks for lighter, more open line work; right asks for a heavier dark ground with the white shapes reading as openings in it.

It is a request the image model interprets loosely rather than a measurement it will hit, so treat it as a dial to find a spot on rather than a number to set.

Image quality

How much the picture costs, and how much fidelity you get: Low, Medium or High. Low is a small fraction of the price of High, and the studio shows you the exact credit cost on the button before you press it. The first entry in the menu, Server default, uses the quality the site is set to, which is named in brackets after it.

If you are bringing your own

Uploading is free on every plan and never costs credits. On Pay as you go, building an uploaded picture into layers the first time costs 250 credits, the same as a generated one; on Studio it is included. What works is two-tone line work: flat black on flat white, no shading and no grey.

• Good: vector art exported as a PNG, inked drawings scanned at high contrast, clip art, stencil designs.
• Hard: pencil sketches, anything with soft shadows, photographs. These go through the same threshold controls and can sometimes be rescued, but they are the difficult case rather than the normal one.
• Size: bigger is better. A small image scaled up gives ragged edges, and the studio cuts along the edges.
• File type: PNG, JPEG or WebP, up to 25 MB and 16.8 megapixels - 4096 × 4096, or as many pixels in another shape, such as 5000 × 3350. Both limits are printed beside Upload image. A picture with more pixels is refused with its size, before anything is done with it: scale it down and upload it again. 4096 pixels across a 900 mm piece is already finer than a laser cuts. The same limit holds for the picture in a .zip opened with Open project. A project you already have with a larger picture is not affected: it cleans and builds as before. SVG and PDF are not accepted, so export vector art as a PNG first, at a good size.

An upload replaces the picture in the open project, and with it the cleaned mask and any layers built from the old picture. To keep both, start a new project for the new picture.

Generating again

Generate Source on a project that already has its artwork replaces that artwork, and the old one is not kept anywhere — it cost money to make, and generating never draws the same picture twice. So the button asks first: Generate in a new project makes a new project with the prompt and settings on screen and generates there, leaving the open one exactly as it was; Replace it generates in this project; Cancel or Escape does nothing. Download All (.zip) in the bottom bar keeps a copy of the current artwork first if you want both.

The prompt box belongs to the project that is open, and what you type is saved into it. To start something different, press New project beside the project's name at the top first. Once the prompt no longer matches the one the open project's artwork was generated from, a note under the prompt box says so and offers New project with this prompt, which takes the prompt and settings on screen to a new project and puts the open one back to its old prompt.

"That may be the wrong sort of picture"

This appears under the buttons after an upload that is grey all over: no colour, smooth mid-tones, and hardly any pure black or pure white. That is what a depth map looks like, and depth maps belong to Landscape Silhouette Layers, where each grey level becomes a sheet of its own. Here a picture like that gives the studio very little black to cut, and the stack usually comes out flat. A black-and-white photograph or a soft pencil scan can look the same to it, which is why it is advice rather than a refusal.

Open Landscape Silhouette Layers takes you to the other studio. The picture does not go with you, so upload it again there. Carry on here closes the warning and keeps the picture. Nothing is charged for the upload either way.

What makes a design cut badly

• Hairline detail. Anything thinner than about a millimetre will burn away or snap. The check catches most of it, but starting with bolder artwork is easier than fixing it afterwards.
• Grey. A grey area has no edge to follow, so the studio has to guess where the boundary is.
• Open lines. A line that stops in mid-air is not the edge of anything. Closed shapes cut cleanly; loose strokes do not.
• Floating pieces. A shape with nothing connecting it to the rest falls out when you lift the sheet. There is a setting for how to handle these — see Layers and depth.

Questions