I found this Animated Lenticular Dinosaur Card SVG file and fell in love with how it made it look like the dinosaur was moving! I knew I had to make it for one of my nephews for a birthday card. The only bad part about the file, was that it only came with a few short written instructions for how to put the card together. Not to worry! I am here to walk you through the steps and there is even a video at the end of this post!

By the way, this post contains Affiliate Links to companies I have partnered with, such as Amazon. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. You can think of affiliate links like tipping your waitress, only it does not cost you anything extra! Thank you for shopping with my links!

Background on this Animated Lenticular Dinosaur Card

First, I want to give you a little background on this card and the definition of lenticular designs. This card is inspired by lenticular printing which is a technology found in printing used to give the illusion of depth or motion to a stationary object.

Recently I discovered a card making artist that uses this technique to make cards with images that look like they are moving! If you want to purchase the SVG that I used for this animated lenticular dinosaur card you can click HERE.

The magic of this sort of card is a combination of the way the printed image is created and the grid that you look at the image through. Here is what the grid looks like when it is cut. You can see that there are evenly sized and spaced lines and some of them are connected to the outer grid while the others will create the openings that allow you to view the image behind the grid.

When you move the printed piece of paper back and forth behind this grid, the image underneath appears to be moving!

The SVG file for this dinosaur card does come with some instructions in it, but make sure to watch my video below or at my YouTube channel to see the dinosaur “come to life”.

Tips on Print Then Cut

If you have never changed a portion of a SVG file from a cut project to a print then cut project with Cricut Design Space then this project will teach you how to do that. The Flatten button will make the changes for you, but if you are ever struggling with Print Then Cut projects make sure to check out my troubleshooting page HERE.

Animated Lenticular Dinosaur Card Assembly Video

To see the REAL magic of this dinosaur card you have to see it in action, so I created this video to show you not only how to assemble the card, but how the dinosaur appears to move!

Create your own Animated Lenticular Card

Early in 2023, as I was looking at what other people were making and sharing on social media, I was surprised because I saw this exact same animated lenticular card. Honestly at first I thought I was seeing a re-share of my project by someone else! Then I noticed that the leaves on the card were placed differently so I knew it was someone else that had created the same card.

I was really excited about this because I feel like these animated cards are so fun, and creating them could be a great new trend in the card making world. I had to reach out to the person that was sharing her variation of this card, and I am so glad I did because she figured out a way to make other designs for this same type of card.

By the way, the person I am talking about is Donna Leiber, and I found out that she is an artist and even has her own site at Donna-Leiber.pixels.com where she sells her artwork. She is also the type of crafter that likes to figure out how things work, kind of like me. She created her own variations of cards with moving images. Make sure to check out Donna’s site and her YouTube channel. And stay tuned because I might have to follow her lead and create my own animated cards. And of course, once I figure out the process I will share the steps with you here.

Animated Lenticular Dinosaur Card in StarCraft CREATE

If you are like me and are transitioning from a Cricut to learning the new StarCraft CREATE software then you might be wondering how to change something that is set up for cutting, like a svg file, and transform it so that it is a print then cut element. In Cricut Design Space we would have selected everything and made sure it was on a solid shape and just used the Flatten button. In CREATE we want to look how each layer is set within the Style panel. I talk about that in this video.

One thing that did throw me off was that the preview of my print then cut piece was only showing what would be cut. Not to worry, I found out that is normal with software like this. Also, in this video I show how I ran into an error message with my print then cut registration marks and how I fixed that.