Tuesday quick tip: using a page color that isn’t white

There’s a new feature in Silhouette Studio that snuck in with version 4.4. This is something we’ve been wishing for for quite awhile and now it’s here. I saw it last week when I was sharing the tip about changing the default fill and line colors and remembered I meant to show it to you. You can change the color of your page in your Design area!!! And you can turn it back to white quickly as well. That’s today’s Quick Tip.

How to set the default page color

To change this, you’ll go into your Preferences by clicking the gear icon at the lower right of your Design area.

That opens a dialog box where you can set all kinds of preferences. (For my recommendations for all users, see this post). Go into the second tab called Defaults. The third option down is Default Page Color. Click the down arrow to open a color palette and select your color.

You can reset it as many times as you like. Be sure to click Apply and OK at the bottom of the dialog box to save your changes.

Here’s how this is helpful. You can see a preview of, say, how your design would look on a t-shirt of a specific color. Or, you can see white text without having a line color. Before, we’d have to fill a square with color and then either risk grabbing it accidentally or having to put it in a locked layer. This is a gamechanger!

How to create specific colors

The cool thing is you can select a color from your custom-made palettes. See that last row of colors in my pic above? That’s my custom palette of my logo colors. I chose the dark purple and you can see my page color at the right. I wrote about creating those in this post.

So, how do you get a specific color to put in a custom palette? I covered that in the post also, but here’s an overview. You can…

• …select it from a raster image like a photo of a t-shirt or a pattern fill.
• …input specific HSL, RGB or color hex codes.
• …use the Advanced options in the fill panel to select from the color map.

How to toggle back and forth with white

Let’s say you want to see that page color sometimes, but not always. The brilliant Silhouette Studio software developers have added a new keyboard shortcut to toggle between the color and white. Just click w on your computer keyboard. I will warn you that it takes several seconds (even 20 or more) to change, so be patient. This doesn’t change it to having a clear color/white as the default — just lets you see your design without the page color.