Rat Silhouettes: 12 Rats, 5 Mice and 3 Bold Paper-Cut Rats

Rats get most of the room in this set. Twelve designs follow a rat through its day, five are mice, and the last three are heavier rats drawn as bold paper-cut shapes. They’re drawn to look like real animals rather than cartoons, with shaggy fur edges and a long tail in every design.

Twelve rats

Design 1 is an alert rat sitting low with its head lifted, and 2 walks along with its tail trailing. In 3 the rat sits up tall on its haunches, and in 4 it holds something to its mouth to nibble, tail coiled in a loop. Number 5 is caught in mid-leap, 6 runs flat out, and 7 puts its nose to the ground to sniff. Design 8 sits facing you while it grooms. In 9 the rat climbs upward on its hind legs, 10 stretches with its front end low, 11 is curled up asleep, and 12 looks back over its shoulder.

Five mice and three bold rats

The mice, 13 to 17, stand on their hind legs, crouch, nibble a seed held in both paws, scamper with the tail raised, and sit looking up. Their round ears are what set them apart from the rats.

Designs 18 to 20 are the group the index files under Halloween: a rat creeping low with its tail curling up at the tip, one standing with its head raised and mouth open, and one crouched to pounce with its tail up in an S. The guide calls them bold paper-cut rats. There are no pumpkins, bats or moons in them, so the spooky part is up to you.

Solid with details, outline without

In the solid version each animal is one connected black shape, and the eye, the inside of the ear and broad strokes of fur are cut through it as gaps. The tails and whiskers have been thickened and attached to the body so nothing floats loose. The outline version is a narrow band, about 1.8 mm wide at full size, around a simplified outside edge, with nothing inside. Most poses read fine that way. The curled-up sleeper is the exception, since its outline is little more than a rounded mound.

Sizes on the page and in the files

All 12 PDFs keep the same order, one design to a page, with one, four or six copies of it. On US Letter a single copy fills about 6.3 inches on its long side. The six-copy sheets bring that down to about 2.4 inches, which leaves the running rat under an inch tall.

The SVG canvas is 8 x 8 inches, and the PNGs cover the same area at 2400 x 2400 pixels and 300 dpi. The DXF files are in millimeters on a 203.2 mm canvas. Some programs crop to the drawing on import, so check the size before you resize. The 1 mm bridges and 1.8 mm bands are drawing targets, not results from a physical cutting test, so try your own material, blade and size before making a batch.

Questions

How do I tell the mice from the rats?

The mice, numbers 13 to 17, have much bigger, rounder ears for the size of their heads and more compact bodies. Their files and PDF pages are labeled mouse, and Design-Index.csv puts them in their own group.

Will the tails hold up when the design is small?

The tails and whiskers have been thickened and joined to the body, and at the full 8-inch size the connecting bridges are drawn at least 1 mm wide. The four- and six-copy pages shrink everything, so for cut paper the START-HERE file points you to the full-page PDFs.