Multi color foiling in Silhouette Studio with the Foil Quill

Multi color foiling in Silhouette Studio is a fairly simple process. The Foil Quill is used to transfer the foil via heat onto the material. Various types of materials can be used such as vellum, faux leather, acrylic, cardstock and more. Foil accents or creating foiled designs gives your project a little touch of magic.

In this tutorial we will be using a cute Christmas SVG bundle by CleanCutCreative. We also have many great Single line designsfor you to browse through.

Step 1 - Import your design for foiling

Before we can start the foil process, we need to get our design setup and ready.In Silhouette Studio, click on the File menu then select Open.

In the Open panel, locate where you design is stored and then click Ok.

Theelementswe selected arepackaged in the form of a bundle. We then selected the elements we wanted and deleted the rest. One thing to note, when deleting from the original file, always use Save As when saving. This is to prevent overwriting on the original file and losing the other elements.

We then re-arranged the elements in a favorable design.

Step 2 - Add individual colors to the elements

We now need to add colors to the elements of the design. This will make it easier to foil by color and prevent mistakes. Select the elements that will be foiled with the same color. Then go theLine color box at the top of the screen. It looks like box with a red outline. Choose the required color from the palette.

You may find that some of the designs require several colors but can't beungrouped. To get around this, right click andselect Releasecompound path.

The design will now be broken up into its individual parts.

However, some of the design may be broken into multiple parts that you want to color the same. Select those parts of the design, right click and choose Group. In this case, we selected all the parts of the tree to group as one

You can now add a color to the grouped parts. Continue to do this for each part of the design you want foiled a different color.

Step 3 - Add registration marks for accurate foiling

Registration marks are generally used for Print and Cut. But in this case it functions to accurately place the multi color foils on your design. We will not print and cutting the design. Instead we need to make a blank print and cut file. You can follow our setup below or change according to your needs.

Click on the File menu and select New to open a new file. The file will open with a name Untitled (followed by a number).Click on this new file to open it. Now go to Page Setup and select the third icon for the Registration marks.

Make sure that On is ticked so that the registration marks show on your mat. You can adjust the length and thickness according to your requirements. Just a reminder to not make the registration marks so small or thin that the machine can't read them. It's usually best to leave them as is.

Now we are ready to print. Load your print media into your printer, go to File and select Print. You will get a preview of the registration marks. Click Print and the settings box will appear. Select your printer and make any necessary adjustments as needed. Click Print.

Step 4 - Adjust the settings under the Send panel

We can now adjust the settings under the Send panel. Click on the Send panel to go to the material settings. We created our own Foil Quill settings. Set your design to foiling on cardstock. This includes selecting the media as Cardstock, Speed 5, Force 4 and Passes 1.

It's good practice to save a setting as a new one and rename instead of overwriting the preset.The action was set to Sketch with the Sketch Pen as the Tool. Now,select the Line option.

The Line option allows you to only select all areas of a specific color. Say, for example, you want to foil only elements in red. You would then uncheck all of the boxes except for the red box. This will then only foil the parts you selected for that color.

Step 5 - Place the media on the mat for foiling

Take the printed media with the Registration marks and adhere to your mat.

Add your foil piece over the area to be foiled and tape down. We used a magnetic mat designed for the Foil Quill. Your Foil Quill should have been heating up nearby for about 5 min. Be careful as the device is very hot. Once ready, place the mat in the machine. Place the Foil Quill in the corresponding carriage on your screen.

Next, click Send to foil the first color. As you can see below only the red parts have foiled as per the selection under the Line option.

Repeat Step 4 for selecting the areas of the same color to be foiled.

Carry on to foil the selected areas of the design with different colors of foil.

The foil has now be added to all areas of our design. The registration marks aided in creating a visual guide for placement.

If you hold the card up at an angle to the light you can see just how lovely it came out.

We hope you enjoyed making this lovely foiled card. If you did, we have many more great tutorials for you to follow like multi color foiling in Cricut Design Spaceand creating decorative borders with Foil Quill in Silhouette Studio.