Have you ever dropped an object in a pool and looked at it from above the water’s surface? The water gives it a pretty cool optical distortion effect. Here’s how you can simulate this and “drown” your web-to-print template.

Before you start

• Add a page frame (Layout/Page Setup/Add Page Frame). This will create a rectangular shape with the exact same size as the paper size of your template and place it as a bottom layer.
• Assign a light blue fill color to the background shape.
• Input the dummy text, set its horizontal alignment and turn it into a variable web-to-print field.

Text distortion

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The underwater text frame needs to appear distorted. Select it and click on the Interactive Distortion tool from the left toolbox menu.

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You can use any type of distortion that you think works best, but, as a guideline, here are the distortion properties used in this template:

• Select the Zipper Distortion option,
• Set the value of the distortion amplitude to “20″ and the distortion fequency to “0″
• Activate both the Random and Smooth distortion options.

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The result should be similar to this.

Contour

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Select the dummy text and click on the Contour tool from the right tool box menu.

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In the contour properties bar on the top menu:
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• Click on the Center contour icon.
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• Use the smallest contour offset value (0,025mm) to achieve the smoothest color transition.
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• Click on the Linear contour colors icon.
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• Click on the fill color icon to set the fill color.

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The result should be something similar to this.

Transparency

To simulate a liquid environment, we’ll use some water surface image as a semi-transparent overlay image.

Import the image and place it on top of all the objects.

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Click on the image and select the Transparency tool from the toolbox menu on the left.

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Set the transparency propertes in the top transparency settings bar.

• Select the Uniform transparency option as the transparency type,
• Choose the Add option as the transparency operation,
• Set the Starting transparency value to “0″.

The result should be similar to this.

Note. Since the water image is on top of all the other objects and has a custom transparency operation assigned to it, all the colors of the objects underneath it will affect the final look. Ex. We can adjust colors by simply changing the fill color of the background rectangular shape or the text contour.

All done!

Our web-to-print software can handle this effect easily! Upload the template into your catalog, check the Advanced effect rendering checkbox and test it.

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Try this web-to-print template.

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Download the FREE CorelDRAW template file.

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