Heather, The About.com Guide to Soaps, had asked me if I could make her a logo to use as her signature. She wanted, "...my first name above a bar of soap with soap bubbles cascading around the bar and puddling around the whole thing." This seemed like a perfect opportunity to use the new artistic media tool in CorelDRAW 9. This tutorial shows you how I created the image. You shoud be able to follow along with later versions of CorelDRAW, too.

The artistic media tool in CorelDRAW 9 was used to create the bubbles in this tutorial, however, you could recreate the effect using clip art of bubbles, or by drawing your own bubbles.

1.) Draw a rectangle, this is the basis for our bar of soap.

2.) With the rectangle selected, move the pick tool over one of the corner nodes until the cursor changes (A), then drag the node inward to round the corners of the rectangle (B).

A.

B.

3.) Change the fill color to faded pink, and the line color to none. (A left click on the color palette changes the fill, a right click changes the line.)

4.) Activate the interactive extrude tool.

5.) Click and drag on the rectangle with the extrude tool to set the vanishing point. You don't need to be precise here, we will make adjustments later.

6.) In the property toolbar, set the extrusion type for the bottom middle option. If this selection has a name, I'm not aware of it. :-)

7.) Next, let's adjust the lighting so we can give our bar of soap some dimension. In the property bar select the lighting control, and adjust lights 1 and 2 according to these settings:

Light 1 is in the top left front corner, with an intensity of 100.
Light 2 is in the rear right middle position with an intensity of 50.

8.) Adjust the bevel control to a depth of 0.045" and an angle of 45 degrees.

9.) Now that it looks a bit more like a dimensional bar of soap, we can adjust the angle and depth of the extrusion to look a little more realistic. Click on the X in the middle of the bar of soap (the X indicates the vanishing point) and drag it into position so that your bar of soap looks about like mine.

Now for the fun part... bubbles! I have to admit I haven't really explored the artistic media sprayer in CorelDRAW very much yet. This is far from a scientific approach to doing this, but this is how I did it...

10.) Active the artistic media tool.

In the property bar, choose the sprayer,

and activate the bubbles spray list.
.

11.) Draw a few random squiggley lines anywhere across the page and watch them turn into bubbles. We want our bubbles fairly dense, so be sure to draw a line with a lot of humps in it, like the one I've drawn.

12.) The bubbles are going to come out much larger than we need them, so just grab a corner handle and resize the group of bubbles. Keep drawing them, shrinking them, and putting them off to the side until you have a nice assortment of bubbles.

13.) Now activate the pick tool, right click on one set of bubbles and choose separate. You'll see the original line appear. Click on the line and delete it. Repeat this for all the other bubble groups.

14.) Next we are going to break these bubble groups up into even smaller bubble groups. Right click on each bubble group again, but this time chose ungroup (don't choose "ungroup all" or you will have a real mess on your hands!). After you ungroup each one, select smaller portions of the bigger group, and group those. We are just breaking the bubble groups up and putting them in smaller pieces. You can see from my example how I've broken them up.

15.) Now select all your bubble groups and make a copy of them once or twice so we have plenty of bubbles to work with. All these smaller groups of bubbles can be resized and rotated for variety.

16.) Begin to arrange them around your bar of soap so it looks like they are pooling around it. Remember to place a few bubbles behind the soap on the left and right to give it a sense of dimension. (To do this, right click on the bubble group, choose order -> to back). It's best to do this first.

17.) Then continue placing bubbles all around the bar of soap so it looks realistic. Don't forget you can duplicate, resize, and rotate the bubbles for more variety. Place a few tiny bubbles along the top edge of the bar of soap, too.

Here's how my soap suds looked after I finished placing them around the bar of soap.

If you have any extra bubbles leftover, you can just delete them. Now all we have left to do is add the text.

I tried several different fonts. I had originally planned to use a bold script font, but it wasn't very legible once I gave it the carved into the soap effect. Bold fonts worked the best, but I ended up settling on a font called Maiandra GD Bold.

18.) We'll create the text off to the side, and then move it into place. Begin by clicking on the artistic text tool, then click anywhere on the page, and type the text. Change the fill color to 70% black, center align it, adjust the size, and choose an appropriate font. You may need to use the shape tool to adjust the line and letter spacing.

19.) Select the text with the pick tool, then hit the + key on your keyboard to place a duplicate in the same position as the original. Use the arrow keys to nudge the duplicate down and to the right just a tiny bit. (You may need to go to options [ctrl-J] and adjust the nudge settings [under Workspace/Edit]. Mine is set to 0.01 inches.) Color the duplicate the same color as your bar of soap.

20.) Hit the + key again, color this duplicate white, nudge it down and to the right another tiny bit, and send it back one.

21.) Marquee select all three copies of the text, and move it into place on your bar of soap.

22.) Finally, export the image to the format of your choice. I didn't like the results exporting directly from CorelDRAW, so I opened the CDR file in Photo-Paint, and exported it from there.

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