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Creating Distressed Text in CorelDRAW

© 2003 Hunter Elliott.

Distressed text can take on many shapes and sizes, obviously. However, most of the distressed text effects one sees are usually either various texture effects to text in bitmap applications or they're fonts that are already distressed.

There are times, though that you really want something just a bit different than what everyone else is putting out there in the graphics world and you want it as a purely vector object. Enter the Artistic Media brush.

Let's start out in CorelDRAW with some text. I've chosen a fairly fat font (Futura Extra Black) and sized it fairly large for this tutorial (72pt).

To work our text with the Artistic Media brushes, we need to convert our text to an object, so hit Ctrl-Q to convert the text to curves. Now open up the Artistic Media Docker (Window | Dockers | Artistic Media). Let's just use the very first stroke available. Just left-click the stroke and drag it on top of the "text" you want to distress (or just make sure the text is selected and click on the stroke you want to use).

The default settings of the tool may be too "fat" to keep the text legible. With your text selected by the Artistic Media brush, you'll see on the Property Bar the Artistic Media Tool Width setting—just manually enter in a value or click up/down on the arrow buttons to change the width of the tool to a setting you like.

This has a lot of potential for fun. Change the colors, add outlines, break the text and effects apart and apply new Artistic Media strokes or just try the various strokes and see what they do.

This effect can be applied to other items, too; just let that creativity flow!

Using CorelDRAW and Corel PHOTO-PAINT for Your Best Web Graphics · Quick Color Palette · Creating Distressed Text in CorelDRAW · Contrast Masking with Corel PHOTO-PAINT · Colorizing Black and White Photos in Corel PHOTO-PAINT ·

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