Pumpkin Project

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You might not be aware of it, but Halloween as we know it, started life a long time ago as the old Irish festival of Samhain. So, given the fact that I’m Irish, I thought I’d create a stencil for a pumpkin in DraftSight Professional 2018. Just a side note here, traditionally in Ireland, turnips were used to make lanterns at Halloween. They’re a lot smaller and more difficult to carve than a pumpkin!!!

So, using DraftSight Professional 2018, I imported an image file I found on the internet.  I traced the outline using the Pline command and then when finished tracing the outline, I ran the EditPolyLine command and selected Spline to give a nice even curve to the lines.

Next step was to fill in the areas I want to cut out. I used the Hatch command and selected the Solid hatch (it’s a predefined pattern). I then selected the areas I wanted to hatch and let DraftSight Professional 2018 do the hard work!

I decided to add some text to the stencil. As the text will be cut out, I decided to use an outline font, I settled on APOUTLIN.SHX

In case you are wondering, Oíche Shamhna is Irish for Halloween.

I then wanted to explode the text so that I could add cutting lines on the letter A, otherwise the middle of the letter would fall out!  To do this, I used the ExplodeText command and selected the text. Once I added the cutting lines, I then used the Hatch command again and filled in the areas I wanted to cut.

It’s a bit difficult to make out the cutting lines on the letter A, so I’ve zoomed in below to show you.

The final step is to Print the drawing out on to an A4 sheet of paper, stick it to my hollowed out pumpkin and start cutting. But that’s a job for tomorrow. Remember, safety first when cutting your pumpkin, keep all out fingers out of the way of the blade!

And that’s how I created my first ever pumpkin stencil using DraftSight Professional 2018.

Learn more about DraftSight 2018 here. 

Purchase DraftSight Professional 2018 for as low as $99 here.

 

MJ Smyth

MJ Smyth

The first time I used CAD, it was on a DOS PC with an 8088 processor, 640K of memory and a Hercules Mono Graphics Card... That, well that was a long long time ago. I switched to DraftSight the day it was released and haven't looked back!
MJ Smyth

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