Mario card from first svg cut with Cricut Explore

Here's step by step pictures of my first svg attempt to make a Mario brothers themed card. I found the svg's for free here at Krafty Nook's amazing blog.  I have many great memories of playing super Mario brothers with friends. I loved how it turned out and couldn't believe the little itty bitty pieces my explore cut.  Let's get started! :) Log into design space, click on new project. On the left hand side of the screen, you will see upload image. Click on upload image.  (For svg's you find online, you save them as an svg on your computer. )Then, you click on vector upload to get them in your design space and this screen comes up.

Click on browse, then find where you saved your svg file.


I selected Mario and then clicked open.


Now I clicked save image.



After I had saved him to my design space, I clicked on Mario's image and then selected insert in the bottom right corner.

 

It's a me...Mario!!!  Now here he is in design space, you size him by clicking on the little dots shown in the rectangle around him and you can drag him until he is the size you want. It's time to cut the pieces out on the different color papers on each mat. Black is the base. I cut his face in white and then colored with my twin touch marker in light beige because I didn't have any colored cardstock that was an exact skin tone match.

It assembled like a puzzle with lots of little pieces.

 

 

I thought I was almost done with the one on the left when I realized the placement was wrong so that made there not be enough room for the final pieces. Tip I learned along the way is to start with the outer edge pieces. I started this one on the right with the top part of the hat. I kept my pc on the overall picture and had it as large as it would go, so I could better see where I was placing each little part. I used my CTMH tweezers and bonding memories glue pen to attach each piece. This made it a lot easier and prevented glue on my hands. You have a few seconds to get each part right and then it's permanent with this glue. You can tell in the left Mario that getting his hand perfect was tricky. Once the hat outline is on, it was a lot easier for me to align the pieces so the black base had enough room between each little bit. Now on to my finished Mario!!!

Tada!!  There he is all finished! This picture makes me think evil Mario has come in and smashed good Mario to pieces. I had a lot of fun making my first svg. In design space, the different layers of the svg show on mats that are colored the color the cardstock needs to be. I found that a lot less confusing on my other cricuts because if you forgot where you were, you could just look at the computer that shows what mat you are on and click on next and previous mats to figure out what is left. Here's the card I made with this project.

 

I wanted it to look like Mario and Luigi were high fiving each other as they were stomping the goomba. I found a picture of paper mario in a google search and then I used crayola markers
to make the scene. The graphics on Nintendo game were not clear or perfect. My background is a nod to the classic game. I would have made the background exact to the game, but I didn't find an svg file for the ? box or the drain pipe and I was running out of time to get the card to my friend Adam. I had it all finished about an hour before he came to my house. It was probably good that I didn't have more time, I would have had all the characters all over my house. Thank you for reading my long blog!

Here are the products used: Colorboc paper(for my first svg, I didn't want to ruin any CTMH paper!)
ShinHan™ Touch Twin™ Barely Beige Marker  
tweezers
bonding memories glue pen
glue dots

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