Learn how to add a cool looking metallic text with glow in your web-to-print templates using bevel and fountain fill.

Try this web-to-print template.

Before you start

Turn to the text that you want to appear metallic into a variable input field. Learn how to do that here.

Fountain fill

Open the Object properties docker by pressing Alt+Enter on your keyboard or by going to (Window/Dockers/Properties).

/

/

Choose Fountain Fill as the fill type.

/

/

/

/

/

/

Click the Advanced button to assign a fountain fill (gradient). This will give your text the appearance of a metal material. CorelDRAW has many presets that you can use as a starting point.

/

/

/

/

/

/

/

/

Choose one you think will work best and change its colors depending on what kind of metal appearance you’re trying to achieve.

a

/

/

/

The result should be something similar to this.

Bevel

Use the Extrude tool from the tool box menu on the left to add an extrude effect to the text.

/

The result should be something similar to this.

/

/

/

/

Click on the Bevel icon in the top horizontal menu and check the Use Beveal and Show Bevel Only check-boxes.

/

/

/

/

/

/

/

Your text should now look like this.

Bling

Now it’s time to add that cool looking glow to the last letter of the text. First you need to draw a shape that will resemble an optical glow.

To achieve this, use the Star tool to draw a 8 point star and fill it with a uniform white color. Hold Ctrl while drawing the star to get a perfect symmetric shape.

You can modify the shape of the star to make it look more like an optical glow with the Shape tool and the Interactive distortion tool.

/

/

Use the Shape tool (F10) to push the inner nodes of the star towards it’s center.

/

/

/

/

/

/

/

/

/

Use the Distortion tool to curve the edges of the star by clicking on it’s center and draging the cursor outwords till you are satisfied with the level of distortion.

/

/

/

/

/

/

/

The result should be something similar to this.

Final steps

Now that you have everything you need, it’s time to put it all togather and turn it into a variable field in your template. Read more…

/

Add {curved brackets} before the first and after the last letter of the metalic text and duplicate it using Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V.

/

Right click on the top text object and click Break Bevel Group Apart. This will seperate the top text object into a simple fountain filled object and a group of objects that form the bevel. Delete the group of objects that contains the bevel and make the text transparent.

Select the star that you made earlier, press Ctrl+X, click on the top transparent text with the Text tool and paste the star using Ctrl+V after the second closing bracket “}“.

/

/

Open the Character formatting docker using Ctrl+T and change the Character shift values to make the star appear on the top of the last letter.

/

/

/

/

/

/

/

The result should be something similar to this.

All done!

Our web-to-print software can handle this effect easily! Upload the template into your catalog and test it. The text that you enter in the input field should replace the metallic text between the brackets and the bling star should always appear on top of the last letter.

Download the FREE CorelDRAW template file.