Free desert SVG files

Mesas, buttes and what holds them together

A desert skyline is made of a few plain shapes: the mesa, wide and flat on top; the butte, the same thing worn down until it is taller than it is wide; and the spire, which is what is left of a butte. Each one here is a cap of sheer cliff on a hollow skirt of scree, which is what makes a block of black read as rock and not as a building.

The rock layers are cut lines about 1.6 mm wide that stop 3 mm short of the edges, so a mesa never falls into slices. The thinnest solid parts are the thumb of rock beside each butte and the arms of the saguaros, 3 to 4 mm wide when the design is 100 mm across. All of it cuts in vinyl from about 80 mm and in card from 100 mm. The camel caravan is the fine one: cut it larger.

Layers for a shadow box

The desert silhouette, the buttes, the mesa, the dunes and the rock arch each stand on a straight strip of ground, so they can be cut from card or thin wood and stood one behind another. Put the dunes or the mesa at the back, the buttes in the middle and the arch or the row of desert plants at the front, and light it from behind with a warm colour for a sunset.

How to open the files

• Cricut Design Space: choose Upload, pick the SVG, and add it to the canvas. Set the width you want; the shape is already welded.
• Silhouette Studio: Designer Edition and above open the SVG. The free Basic Edition does not, so open the DXF instead.
• LightBurn, xTool Creative Space and Glowforge: import the SVG, then set the layer to cut, score or engrave.
• Inkscape, Illustrator and Affinity: open the SVG. It is a plain filled path, so you can recolour it, add a stroke or combine it with your own work.
• Printing or sublimation: use the PNG, which has a transparent background.

Each design page lists the file’s narrowest part at seven sizes, so you can tell whether it will survive at the size you plan to cut.

Questions