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.