 What is up? A welcome back. We have another super easy laser craft that sells really well. This was a patron request. They requested to be able to wrap text inside of an object, like a heart or a guitar. So we're gonna do two versions. We're gonna do an easy version and a little more advanced version. We just missed Valentine's Day, but guess what's right around the corner? Wedding season. And a gift like this is perfect for a wedding. Really, a birthday, any occasion. But if you can personalize it, especially if you know what maybe their first dance song is gonna be, this is a great personalized gift. Our materials are gonna be about $5 and I've seen these going for the small ones, anywhere from $30 to $50. You can take this gift from any range. You can make it affordable with affordable materials or you can upscale this to using something like some hardwoods and really make this somewhere in that $100, $150 range. Step one, we're gonna gather all of our supplies. We're gonna use some quarter inch MDF spray paint. I'm gonna use some Foxy Hughes paints to paint our boards. We're gonna do a little pre-painting. We're gonna use this Starbond thick for assembly. And some 12 inch masking tape. Step two, we're gonna make our design. We're gonna grab some objects from Canva and then we're gonna use that wrap text feature over in Adobe Illustrator. We will start in Canva. We'll grab some clip art. I know what I wanna do with these two and Kim wants something in a heart. We'll export this and import it into Adobe Illustrator. We'll start with this heart over here. We're gonna add some lyrics. We'll go back and grab the lyrics. We'll say copy. We'll paste it into notepad. I like notepad because it takes out all of the formatting. Now I wanna make all of these like one continuous line. So I'm gonna grab right behind the B and try to grab this carriage return. I'm gonna go edit, replace. Now I see this blinking little thing here. Says I got my carriage return, so I do have it. I'm gonna replace that carriage return with dot, dot, dot. Space, that's feel like, that feels soggy, right? I'm gonna replace. There, now all of my text is on one line. I'm gonna grab all of my text, copy. Back into Illustrator, here's my heart. How big do you want this thing? Oh no, now I have to see. All right, well let's start. I'm gonna go over to my type tool. 10 inches. Hold down the little triangle, select area type tool. Now I have a little circle next to my cursor. I'm gonna click on the path and it'll fill it with all that lorem ipson stuff. I'm just gonna paste control V. Go back to my select tool and now I can start messing with the font and filling in this heart. Oh yeah, you wanted what kind of font? Was it? Dancing Scripts. Yeah, now let's start playing with the font. Zoom in, I want this to be justified all lines. Really fills it in. Yes. Yep, and now I can even go up here and select area type tools. And actually it just, I can make it multiple columns. Multiple rows, yep, broken heart. Oh, multiple rows, that's good. When I was looking for these, they had different titles like right in the middle. So that would be good for me. That'd be a good one. And then I can control the spacing or the span between them. We can do inset. We don't need an inset for this though. I feel like we're missing the last few words and I'm gonna bring the letters in a little bit. Looks like we're still missing some letters. See that OO? I think if we could stop at U or OO would be. Yeah, I was just saying you could take out OO. Well, it leaves just an O. Oh, oh, oh. Yeah, I'll just. That's good enough. I don't think anybody's gonna read all of the lyrics. All right, let's give this thing a title. We'll go back to the type tool, the regular type tool. And we'll say all of me. We'll hold shift and drag it out. And this is actually gonna be Andrea. Is that what it is? Mm-hmm. Bella Rosa. That's a little big. Hold shift and drag it down. Copy, paste. Now down here, this is gonna be about me and you, Kim. Kim. And Garrett. That's a big, that's a biggie. Just shrink this a little bit. Bring us together. It's about bringing us together. All right, we'll center all of these guys. Center. Probably move this one up, hold shift. You think? Yeah, I like it. Looks good. All right, let's grab all of this and we'll say control X. I already have a background ready. Gonna paste it on here. I'll have to adjust the frame, but let's go do the other one. The other one is gonna be fun. All right, let's start by making my guitar sideways. And how big do I want this thing? Right now, we'll just say like 17 inches wide. All right, let's zoom in. Now I already got a song ready. So I know I'm gonna want these three little birds over here. So I'm gonna shrink them down. I think we can get them on here. They can sit up on these little keys, these little guitar things. I don't need this branch that they're on, so I'm gonna go to my erase tool and we'll erase this branch. Those are gonna need to be perfect. They're about to be glued to the guitar. All right, let's bring these guys down. My little, oh, my three little birds. So cute. All right, let me grab these guys and this we're gonna unite, unite. All right, I'm gonna make a copy of this thing. What's on this layer? That's the only thing on this layer. I am gonna duplicate layer one. I'm gonna hide layer one. Now I'm gonna mess with layer two or copy a layer one. Gonna draw a square or a rectangle on layer one. Make sure layer one is selected. I'm gonna detach this handle because I wanna use this handle for something else. Let's turn this a different color so I can tell them apart. Drag in a color palette. We're gonna make it blue. All right, I'm gonna grab the guitar and this part. Gonna go over to my Pathfinder. I have to go to my Pathfinder by Window, Pathfinder. And then I'm gonna select Divide. I'm gonna ungroup these and then I can remove this piece, this piece. And now my handle is separate. Control Z to put it back. All right, now it's time to add some lyrics to my guitar and then I'm gonna add the title inside the handle. So first, let me drag this handle in a little bit. To do that, I'm gonna take my Pen tool with this piece selected. I'm gonna hold Control, grab this anchor point, start to drag it and hold Shift. That'll keep it on its path. And I'm gonna do the same down here till it's about even. There we go. All right, let's go get my lyrics. I already went and found them. Trying to make it easy. Over here, I'm gonna use the Type tool. I'm gonna use the Area Type tool one more time. I'm gonna try to do it inside the guitar. I can't do it inside the guitar. This is a compound path, which means it's got shapes inside it. So I'm gonna need to release this thing, but I'm gonna get lost if I keep it black. So I'll make it green. And now I'm gonna go to Release, which releases all the objects. So now this is solid and I have the other objects that are inside. Still out here. We'll go Control Z, Control Z, Control Z. Back to my Type tool. I'm gonna click on it. Now I can put my text in here. So let's paste my text in. Now it looks like a mess. I'm gonna bring it way down and I'm gonna use a different font. This one looks fun. Just give me something to start with because I still have, now it's gonna go through these pieces here. And if I hide these green pieces, it's gonna look weird. Let me group them. That's my handle. Here's my green pieces. See, it's gonna write through everything. I don't want that. Let's make a copy of the handle, Control C, Control V to paste in place. I'm gonna grab that and my green pieces and then I'm gonna select my text. I'm gonna go Object, Text Wrap, Make. Yes. So now it goes around all of these pieces. But now these pieces are still in the way. So I'm gonna group these pieces, group. And inside this group, I'm gonna take the handle and the green. I'm gonna get rid of the fill there. Now I'm back to the text. Inside this, we're gonna bring the line spacing down. I'm just gonna play with these controls until it looks like it's in the shape of a guitar. Looks good enough, right? All right, now for the handle. This handle is not inside this group, so I can hide this group. So let's get the title in here. I'm gonna go back to my text tool, my regular type tool. I'm gonna type out three little birds. I'm gonna hold Shift and drag a corner. Gonna line it up inside this handle here or where this handle will be. Over to my, over to my layers, I'm gonna drag the handle above my three little birds. I'm gonna grab both of these. Over to Object, Envelope Distort, Make with Top Object. There are now three little birds. It is in the shape of the handle. And everything goes around it. Now let's bring back layer one. Well, let's group everything here. So everything's ungrouped. Group, bring back layer one. We're gonna get rid of the fill and we're gonna make it a cut line. So now it should cut out my guitar. Actually, I don't want all these cut lines. I don't want it to cut out the strings and stuff. I'm gonna select the group. Gonna unite everything. Actually, I'm just gonna delete everything inside. There now I should just have my outline. Release. There, now I have an outline. Let's take this whole thing. Copy. And we'll put it on this background. Hold Shift, make it a little bit smaller. Let's take this back layer and make it off-way for now. All right, what do you think, Kim? You ready? Yeah. I'm gonna turn these two files into cut files. But if you like this type of content, you should join us over on Patreon where once a month we have a more in-depth class on how to do things just like this. Step three. We're gonna make all of our cuts. But first, we're gonna do some pre-painting prep work. We're gonna paint our boards. Make sure it's really dry. Then we're gonna mask it off before we do any engraving. That way we'll be able to have two colors. All right. Paint me, babe. Give me the squirts. And then paint. All right, you've got paint in that ruler, so I don't think we need a ton. Oh, yeah, this roller's already feeling sloppy. This is a sloppy roller. I'm gonna just kind of push it in the room. You got the tiniest handle. I like them small, Kim. It's about the control. It's not about the size, Kim. It's about the control. We were talking earlier about our wedding song. We were gonna put that in our intro. But neither of us can remember our wedding song. I've got to go back and find a video so that I can tell you how many of you guys that have been married for a while can remember what your first dance was. I meant everybody, but everybody but us can remember. Can you remember your wedding song? I just know what your wedding song was down below. Yeah. I tried. I cannot remember. I know. I texted the kids. I was too in the moment. We were married 10 years ago, so it wasn't even that long ago, but I texted some of our kids and said, okay, who remembers the first song we danced to? I hope we get an answer. Oh, I don't know. Okay, now that the paint is dry, dry, we're gonna mask it off. We're gonna use this tiniest handle. We're gonna use this 12 inch masking tape, mainly so that that smoke and the char doesn't then stick on top of the paint. Hopefully this will collect all the char and will be good to go. If you do get some of that char on your paint, you can always use something like a baby wipe or a magic eraser. Yeah, that's Garrett's go-to. Do you want my help now? I have to stick my whole arm in there. That's how I do it. I use to use my masculine forearms. Now you might think that this is not sticking at first, but that's because you have to burnish it or use a little yes, yes. Yeah, I'm gonna start that. See, it looks like it's not sticking, but once you use this to push it down, it does a great job of sticking to the wood. And the more dry your paint is, again, the better it will stick. So make sure your paint is really dry and there's no moisture that will get between this and the paint. Our boards are all masked off. We're gonna take these over to our Aion Nova 14 laser and cut everything out. Let's import our artwork into Lightburn. We're gonna start with the heart. The red lines are for cut. The black lines are for engrave and with that, we're not going to use Aresist. So we're gonna select our design and send it to the laser. Spray paint and then remove the masking. Right, before we actually remove the masking, it's very tempting to wanna see how it looks, but don't remove it yet. Don't touch it. These are gonna look a little bit nicer if you spray paint this masking so that the black spray paint gets into the engraving before you remove the masking. This is gonna be a nicer contrast between the engrave and the backer. And we'll start with the big pieces that are way to all the tiny pieces. We have a trick. We have a trick to the tiny pieces. If you haven't seen this little like duct tape trick give it a try. Oh, this is a Gorilla Tape serious business. Don't pull the paint off. This is looking beautiful. Let me show you a close up of how detailed this is. I did that first bit of tape pulled off some of the paint so I found the dab method worked better. So I'm just gonna put what, I'm gonna use one of these little micro q-tips and just put a little dab of paint back on there. And that is it. That looks perfect. Kim thinks my guitar is gonna get lost against my subway tile. Oh, I might put it in my crooked. She had me paint a test piece. We did the back. We did it in that color change paint. Now she wants me to paint the subway tile. What do you think? Should I paint the subway tile like this color change paint or keep it white? I probably should have painted the guitar the color change paint. What do you guys think? I think that's too boring. Now you need something else on there. Maybe That's too busy. And that's a little too busy. I don't know where we're gonna go. Let's just finish it like that. We're finishing up like this. Step five. We're gonna bring it all together. A little bit of star bond thick. We're gonna glue our frames on and then I'm gonna glue my guitar down. So the great thing about this one it's just super easy. All we're gonna do is put this frame on the outside edges and then it is complete. So let's see how this looks.