Software Used: Corel Photo-Paint 9, CorelDRAW 9.
This logo was created for the electronic greeting cards section of this site (no longer online). This second part covers the CorelDRAW portion of the lesson. If you came here from a search, you can go to part one for the Photo-Paint portion of the lesson including the background and text.
1.) Open CorelDRAW to a new drawing.
2.) Go to File -> Import, navigate to where you save the Photo-Paint file in part one, and double-click to import it. Click once on the page to import the image.
3.)
Zoom in to a comfortable level for working on the image. You
can do this by selecting the 
zoom tool, then dragging a box around area of the page you want
to fill the window.
4.)
Select the 
ellipse tool. Hold the control key down as you drag to create
a circle about 1.5 inches across. You can create the circle
anywhere on the page. We'll move the complete logo into place
over the background later.
5.)
Hit the plus [+] key to clone the circle, then change the size
to 0.9 inches in the property bar. Hit enter to apply the change.
By using the plus key, the two circles remain centered to each
other.
6.) Select both circles by dragging a marquee around them with the pointer. Right click on the red color swatch in the palette to change the line color.
7.)
Select the smaller circle, click the outline tool, and choose
the 2 point line width.
| 8.) Delect the outer circle, click the outline tool, and choose the first icon to open the outline pen dialog. Change the outline width to 3 points. |
|
9.)
Select both circles, go to Arrange -> Convert outline to
object. This is important for a later step when we will apply
transparency to the entire "stamp". Transparent effects
are not applied to outlines, so the outline must be converted
to an object first.
10.)
Next, we'll create the text for the stamp. Click the text tool,
and click on the page and type your text. I made the 'e', the
word 'cards', 'graphics software', and 'at about.com' each a
separate object so that I could move them into place easily.
You can create the text anywhere off to the side, we'll be moving
it into place later. Make sure all the text is center aligned.
11.)
Select all the text and choose a font. I used Humnst777 Blk
BT and Humnst777 Lt BT. Set the fill to red. I used the following
point sizes:
e = 48 pts
cards = 18 pts
graphics software = 16 pts
at about.com = 16 pts
12.) Drag the 'e' and 'card' text into place in the center of the small circle.
13.)
Create another circle about 1 inch across, then duplicate it.
14.) Select the text 'graphics software', go to Text -> Fit Text to Path, and click the arrow on the edge of one of the new circles.
15.) Select the circle then right click the X in the color palette to set the outline to none.
16.) Move the text into position on the logo, and adjust the distance from path in the property bar until it is evenly spaced between the two circles of the logo (I used .02").
17.) Repeat step 14 for the 'at about.com' text, fitting it to the second circle..
18.)
In the property bar, change the text placement to the third
option, and click the 
button to place the text on the other side.
19.)
Change the outline to none and move the text into position on
the logo. Adjust the distance from path in the property bar
until it is evenly spaced between the two circles of the logo
(I used -.17").
20.) Drag a marquee around the entire "stamp", right click, and choose group.
21.) Select the transparency tool and choose uniform from the property bar. The inside of the circle will turn gray. This is because there are two circles left over from when we converted the original two circles to objects.
22.) Go to Windows -> Dockers -> Object Manager, expand layer 1, then expand the group of objects that makes up the stamp. Right click on each of the two gray ellipses in the object manager and choose cut to remove them.
23.)
Click once on the stamp group and rotate it slightly by dragging
on one of the double pointing arrows in the corner. Move the
stamp into place over the background image we imported earlier.
Adjust the rotation if you need to.
24.) Select the transparency tool while the stamp is still selected. In the property bar, change the transparency operation to "subtract" from the drop down list, and change the starting transparecy to 19. The subtract operation is similar to the merge modes we used in the Photo-paint portion of this lesson, and it gives us a nice darkened 'bleed' look on the portion of the stamp that overlaps the paper.
25.) For the final step you can double click the pointer tool to select all, and export the image to the format of your choice. You also might want to save the image to native CorelDRAW format for future editing.
Wow, we covered a lot in this tutorial... merge modes, text on a curve, and transparency effects. I hope you enjoyed it!
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Images:
Copyright 1999, S. Chastain, unless otherwise noted.
Screen shots captured with Corel Capture 9. Image conversion
and optimization with Photoshop 5.5.
