Creating a mask with CorelDRAW!

Creating a mask with CorelDRAW!

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): During the recent launching of CorelDRAW! 5.0 in
Jakarta, which was organized by PT Sistech Kharisma, Brad Young
from Corel Corporation, Canada, showed off a masking effect that
could actually be achieved in CorelDRAW! 4.0 as well.
Nevertheless, the effect drew a lot of "Wow!"s from the audience.
Here, in the accompanying illustration I show you an example of
the effect that Brad demonstrated in his presentation.

As you can see, the characters in the word "INVEST!" have the
fill of a bitmap image of a Rp. 50,000.00 note. It looks as if
you had painted each of the characters using some kind of a paint
airbrush tool. This effect is actually very easy to create, as
CorelDRAW! can combine bitmap images with vector graphics with no
problem at all. First, you have to scan the money. After
retouching the scanned image as necessary, using CorelPHOTO-
PAINT! or ImagePals, it is later incorporated into CorelDRAW!.
Once it is placed on the page, all you have to do is prepare the
mask.

A mask works more or less like a stencil sheet. When you roll
the stencil machine, the ink bleeds through the perforated part
of the sheet and leaves prints on the pages. The mask in Corel
DRAW! lets you look at any object placed behind it.

Before you go on, you'd better change to wireframe mode to
speed up work. Click on the Display menu item, and click on Edit
Wireframe. The shortcut for this is Ctrl-F9. The imported bitmap
image will turn into a gray scale image, and screen redraw will
be much faster. Then select the Rectangle tool from the toolbox
and create a box slightly larger than the bitmap image. Give it
the white solid fill. The next step is to select the Artistic
Text tool and type in the word "INVEST!". Using the Pick tool,
pick up the text and place it inside the box. While the text is
still selected, press Ctrl-T to call the Artistic Text dialog box
to change the font. Remember, to make the Rp. 50,000.00 back
ground stand out, you have to use the fattest font possible. If
you chose the slim Helvetica font, people wouldn't notice the Rp.
50,000.00 note. For the illustration I've chosen the USABlack
font. If you prefer, you can choose BahamasHeavy or Futura XBlk
BT, for this purpose.

Now your task is to fit the characters into the bitmap image.
Since you're working in the wireframe mode, you'll have no
difficulty. Just resize the characters horizontally and vertical
ly so that they fit the image correctly. Give the characters the
white fill and hairline border.

Select

The next step is to punch the characters out. To do this, you
have to select both the rectangle and the characters, but you
should not include the bitmap. To select the second element in
CorelDRAW!, you have to press Shift before doing it. In this
particular case, you select the text and you press Shift as you
select the rectangle. Then combine them by clicking on Arrange,
and Combine. Or, you can simply press Ctrl-L. This transforms the
selected elements into a mask. All you have to do now is to
uncheck the Edit Wireframe menu item or press Shift-F9 again.

By the way, if you want to make sure that the characters are
positioned exactly at the center of the rectangle, you'll have to
align them first before combining them. To do so, while both
elements are still selected, call up the align dialog box by
clicking on Arrange and Align. The shortcut key is Ctrl-A. Click
on both Center Horizontally and Center Vertically.

The possibilities for further improvement are plenty. You can
kern the characters before combining it with the rectangle to
tighten the look of the word "INVEST!". You can achieve this by
using the Shape menu item and kern the characters interactively.

Finally, you can also alter the color of the bitmap image if
you wish. You can do this by selecting the image with the Pick
tool and calling the Outline Color dialog box. Select the CMYK
color model, and adjust the value for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and
Black respectively. After that, call out the Fill Color dialog
box and do the same thing until you get the most satisfactory
result.