Although CorelDRAW offers us an option of creating an extrusion with its Interactive Extrude tool designed for the purpose, we’re going to simulate the extrusion using CorelDRAW’s Interactive Blending tool to achieve better quality and avoid the unwanted pixelation, notorious for the Extrude tool.

Here’s how you can create the 3D extrusion of the characters as needed for the Dream design technique using CorelDRAWs Interactive Blending tool.

Extrusion

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Basically, what we need are Outline blendings. These are blending groups in which the blended objects have No Fill and just an outline. This way the object (character) remains hollow inside but has walls along the edges.

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Lets start of by duplicating the text frame and offsetting the bottom copy to set the “ending edge” of the extrusion.

To make the extrusion more visible, you should change the outline color of one copy.

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Next we need to select both text frames and activate CorelDRAWs Interactive Blending tool from the toolbox menu on the left. Use these settings as reference:

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Click on one frame’s outline and drag towards the other one ’till you see blending steps formed.

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The result should be similar to this, a 3D extrusion created by blending two outlined objects.

Complex extrusion edges

You can use the same extruding technique as explained above to create complex contoured edges. All you need to do is to add a few more blending groups.

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Copy the top hollow outlined text frame, assign a smaller outline width to it and copy/offset it just like you did before.

Note. Offset the top copy this time.

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Select both objects, click on one outline and drag towards the other one with CorelDRAWs Interactive Blending tool just like you did before.

The result should be similar to this.

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Note. Repeat this step to add the same edge on the back side of the character.

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You can use this technique to achieve lots of different extrusion types with contoured edges.

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