Anastasiia Ku

In this post I will share a few tips with you of how to create a recycle sign in CorelDRAW.

Select Arrow Shapes Tool from the docker on the left:

On the properties docker select the arrow shape you need:

Draw an arrow. I coloured it the way you see below, but just simple flat coloured arrow will still do.

We need to get round corners, so draw a rectangle and change the roundrenss of the corners from 0 to 67:

Draw another rectangle to cover the rest of the arrow, select it together with the rectangle drawn before and Weld:

Select the new shape and the arrow and Intersect so you get the arrow with a nice round corners on the bottom:

Select the arrow and change the angle from 0 to 330 (or -30) degrees:

Copy the arrow, paste, reflect the copy horisontally, and group both objects:

Draw a rectangle so it covers half of the the arrows and apply Back Minus Front:

Ungroup the objects, so you will get a part of the first and second arrows separated. Then select the bottom part of the second arrow, paste it again, select it together with the first arrow, and apply Back Minus Front:

Select the second part of the arrow and move it a bit to the right:

Now, the sharp corners on the top have to be adjusted. Select Shape Tool, right click on the line and chose To Curve:

In the end the result has to be like this:

Draw the shape of the highlights, colour them white and apply trancparancy (Uniform):

Select the back shapes of the arrows and apply contour:

Group these objects, click twice on the group, move the rotation centre like shown below. Copy, paste and rotate, holding Ctrl, so you’ve got the recycle sign shape.

You ll get something like this:

Right click on the sign, and ungroup the arrows:

In order to place some shapes to the front, right click > Order > To Front Of Page:

That is basically it. Now you can add some texture to the sign. Right click on the blank page, import a .jpg image with some texture, place the sign on top of that and intersect, so you get something like this:

Now, to create a background, select the bitmap image, Trace Bitmap> Outline Trace>High Quality Image:

Place the background to the back, and here it is:

You can also try to change the outline’s number of steps and colour, so you will get a bit different result:

That is it! If you have any questions feel free to ask in the comment section!