Take shadows and light sources to the next level. This technique helpa you add a cool realistic shading effect to text in your web-to-print template. The idea is to create an illusion of an object is casting its shadow on the template and letting raise of light pass through and highlight parts of the design.

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.
• Input the dummy text and turn it into a variable web-to-print field.

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In a nutshell, we’ll create some stream shapes and assign custom shadow and transparency effects to make them blurred and see-through, thus simulating light streams.

Background

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First let’s add a gradient to the background. Select the background shape and assign a radial fountain fill to it.

Drag the darker color center to the bottom right corner.

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The result should be similar to this.

Dummy text

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Duplicate the dummy text and add a custom linear fountain fill to the copy.

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Select the original solid white colored dummy text under the copied one and offset it by only a few pixels to the top left. This is a simple way to achieve the illusion as if the characters are highlighted on the side of the light source.

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The result should be similar to this.

Shadow

Text shadow

Select the bottom dummy text frame and assign a small bottom-right drop shadow using the Drop Shadow tool from left tool box menu.

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The result should be similar to this.

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Shadow streams

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Next we want to create some streams of natural shadows. To achieve this, we’ll start with the Rectangle Tool and draw a few different rectangles. Combine them all into a single curve (Right click/Combine).

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Add a perspective to the shadow streams. Go to Effects/Add Perspective and drag the corner nodes to achieve the desired perspective.

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Now it’s time to make those lines look like shadow streams. First let’s get rid of the sharp edges by adding a small glow shadow to the shapes. Select the shape and click on the Interactive Drop Shadow tool. Select Small Glow preset from the drop down preset list. You can use these settings:

Next, add a transparency effect to the shadow streams. Activate CorelDRAW’s Transparency Tool from the tool box menu on the left and assign a uniform transparency.

PowerClip

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The final step is to place the shadow streams in a PowerClip on top of all the other objects. Add another page frame and move it to the top of the layer (Layout/Page Setup/Add Page Frame).

Note. Since this rectangle needs to be transparent, assign a No Fill to it from the color palette.

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Select the shadow streams curve and place it inside that shape as a PowerClip.

The result should be similar to this.

All done!

Our web-to-print software can handle this effect easily! Upload the template into your catalog 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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Note. This technique was inspired by a Photoshop Tutorial on psdtuts.com