How to use Chic Mouldings’ Digital Ornamental Moulding Samples
Choosing the right moulding for your project can be overwhelming. You want to get it right first time. It will save you time and money.
Chic Mouldings is the only supplier of decorative mouldings to supply free cut-out digital templates of mouldings that you can download and print to create your own digital mock-up.
If the old school method is more your style, you can simply print them out, cut around the edge and use those as templates on your project to see what will work best. Look for this button 
in the product description.
If you’d like to know about how to create a template for a mock up yourself, see this blog. You can use this method with transfers, stencils, mouldings, even decoupage paper!
And now, here’s how to use the templates to digitally mock up your mouldings.
1 – Photograph your furniture or project.
Make sure you take a clear picture and position the camera square to the side of the piece you are photographing.
2 – Measure your piece.
the face of the piece you will be adding mouldings to. In most cases this will be the front, as shown below. Make a note of the measurements for later on.
3 – Download the Template Image
If a moulding has a template available, it will be downloadable from the description area of a product page.3
To download the ornamental moulding samples in the form of a digital templates, simply click the mon the product page of the design you’d like to try out..
The image you have downloaded is a cut-out image of the moulding. It has been sized to the dimensions of the actual moulding, with a transparent background.
4 – Open your drawing software.
For the sake of this tutorial, I will instruct you how to use Inkscape, which is available to use for free. It is available here.
5 – Import the furniture photo you took.
Navigate to the directory that you saved your photo in, select the photo and click OK.
Your image will now be on your work area.
Save the file by selecting File > Save As and save the file in the usual way.
6 – How to use the Zoom Tool
To zoom in or out to a more suitable view, simply hold down the Ctrl key while you roll the scroll wheel on the mouse (situated between the left and right mouse buttons). This way, you can control your zoom.
Try adjusting the position of the mouse pointer on your workspace. The mouse pointer marks the central point of focus, and the picture will zoom in and out based on where the mouse pointer is.
7 – Draw a rectangle around your furniture
Now we will draw a rectangle that matches the dimensions of your actual piece of furniture.
To do this:
i – On the left side of the screen you see a toolbox. Click the rectangle tool (see below image).
ii – Now move the mouse pointer over to your workspace. Click, hold, rag and then release your left mouse button. You will now have drawn a rectangle.
iii – to make your rectangle the correct dimensions, edit them in the fields shown below. Fill in the measurements your made a note of in step 2.
Your rectangle may not be blue – that is fine, as long as you see a rectangle.
8 – Change the rectangle into a rectangular outline.
i – With the “select” tool 
click on the rectangle. You will see a dotted line outlining the rectangle and some black arrows. These indicate that the rectangle is now selected.
ii – Go to the Object menu at the top, click, then click on Fill and Stroke. A dialogue box will open.
Within the dialogue box, you will see 3 tabs across the top labelled Fill; Stroke Paint; Stroke Style.
iii – On the fill tab, click the black X to select no fill.
iv – On the Stroke Paint tab, click the grey box next to the x to make the stroke colour one flat colour. Then set up the colour values as shown below. R = 0, G = 0, B = 0, A = 100.
v – Click on the Stroke Style tab and make the width 1.
vi – Close the Fill and Stroke Panel.
vii – Click File > Save to save your work.
Your work area should now look something like this. Remember to save regularly! You can use Ctrl+S to do this.
9 – Scale your furniture photo.
It’s time to scale your furniture to it’s actual size, using the rectangle as a guide.
i – With the black arrow tool selected, click on your photo. You will see black arrows appear, and they will be pointing outwards from the photo.
NB – If you click it again, you will see the black arrows change to point around the photo instead of outwards. This means you can rotate the photo. We will come to that later on. For now, make sure the outward pointing arrows are showing.
ii – Make sure the arrows are the correct one to scale the photo.
iii – Use the arrows on the corners and sides by clicking and dragging them. Align the edge of your furniture with the edges of your rectangle. You will see that the arrows turn green when your mouse pointer is over them.
Keep adjusting until your furniture completely fills up the rectangle you made, as shown below (I have made my rectangle red so that it shows up more easily. You can do this yourself by clicking on the colour spectrum bars during step 8, part iv, if you like.
Your furniture is now at 100% scale. You can click on the rectangle to select it, then delete it with the delete key.
10 – Import the Ornamental Moulding Samples.
Now import the templates that you downloaded from the Chic Mouldings product pages.
To do this, follow the same import instructions in step 5.
Import as many mouldings as you would like to try out. In the below picture, I have picked out a pair of rose embellishments and a medallion. Don’t forget to save your file.
Note – All paired moulding templates are supplied as one half of the pair. I will show you how to create the other half of the pair further down.
11 – Move the mouldings into place.
Now click, hold and drag on one of your imported mouldings templates and position it wherever you like.
You can also select an image object and use your keyboard’s cursor arrow keys to move selected items in your workspace. This is especially helpful if you only want to move an object a small distance as you have more precise control.
12 – Duplicate as necessary
To create another medallion for the left hand drawer, I will select the medallion, and then hit Ctrl+C on the keyboard to copy it. You can also select the image, then go Edit > Copy.
Then, either hit Ctrl+V on your keyboard, or select Edit>Paste to paste a duplicate onto the work area. Then select it and drag it into position.
13 – Rotating and Flipping Image Objects
The curved rose stem embellishment needs to be rotated to look right, in my opinion.
To rotate it, I click to select, then click again so the arrows are pointing around the object (see step 9). Then click on one of the arrows and drag it to rotate the object.
I now need to make a duplicate that I can flip to create a mirror image. Follow step 12 to make the duplicate.
To flip the object, make sure it is selected, then click on the left hand arrow in the circle marked Flip illustrated below.
Note also that you can use the rotate buttons illustrated above. Click the left on to rotate anti-clockwise, and the right for clockwise. Each click will turn it 90 degrees.
You can also flip objects on the horizontal axis by using the other Flip arrow. Have a play with the 4 buttons to get a feel for what they do.
This is what my design looks like after mirroring the image.
14 – Grouping objects.
Sometimes you will find you want to keep objects grouped together It can make it quicker to work with, especially when duplicating and moving them around.
You can select multiple objects at once. To do this, click on one, hold down the Shift key, then keep clicking on each one to select. release the shift key when you have finished selecting. Go ahead and select all the objects you would like to group together, In this case, I will group my pair of rose stems.
Now my two objects are selected, so I will go to Object>Group. Note that there is also an option to ungroup, which can be used on previously grouped objects to ungroup them.
You will notice that the dotted rectangles around each object has now become one rectangle around both of them.
15 – Finishing the design layout
Now that I have my sets of rose stems, I will duplicate them (see step 12) and move them into my desired position.
Here is what my final mock-up looks like.
There is so very much more you can do with drawing software like Inkscape. If you cannot find out how to do something, feel free to ask, or check out the many great tutorials on YouTube and the Inkscape website..