Backward. I select both the top and bottom versions of the text then go to your Pathfinder menu and click on the Minus Back button, this is typically the last but- ton on the right on the second row down. This lets the lettering in back act like a cookie cutter, eliminating all of the parts of lettering that overlap, leaving you with just small “highlights” along the bottom edges of all of the letters. 4 - Building Out My Halo With my highlights created I Paste In Back. Command-B (on a Mac), Control-B (on a PC). This pastes a copy of the text exactly where I copied it from, but behind whatever I have selected, which in this case is the highlights. With the full letters pasted in back but still selected (showing the anchor points), I go to the Object menu and pull down to the Path submenu then within that to Offset Path. In that menu you will see a square with a default number in it. Highlight that number and type in 2pt, and then click the OK button. Don’t worry about the Joins or the Mi- ter Limit. You will see that illustrator has created an outline that is offset from the original shape but that the original is still selected too. Using the solid arrow (top left in your toolbox), deselect both of the outlines, and then select the offset line you just created and repeat the process again. For my sample I created eleven offset paths. You will see that because we are using a low opacity (I set the opacity at 3%) that you now get a halo that fades away to almost nothing. 5 - Making the “Smoke” Now that I’ve created my halo, I lock down my origi- nal lettering and my highlights (Command-2 on a Mac, Control-2 on a PC). With those locked down, I select all of the offset paths, and go to the Filter menu, I pull down to the Distort submenu, and within that I go to Roughen. Within the Roughen submenu I get a few choices or options. I used 2% for the Size choice, Rela- tive, 56 per inch on the Detail, and Smooth for the an- chor points option. You can click on the Preview but it may be a bit busy looking for you at the moment. If you don’t want to see all of those anchor points or nodes highlighted, you can tell Illustrator to Hide Edges ei- ther by going through your View menu or by the keyboard commands (Command-H for Mac, or Control-H for PC), the same command toggles you back and forth between being able to see the edges or not. You may be happy with what you have, or maybe you want more. For me, I wanted a bit more, so I selected all of those offset paths again and went to my Filter menu and pulled down to my Distort submenu, and chose Tweak, I left the settings at their default/existing


settings and hit OK.


With the wild halo now built I unlocked my highlights and original lettering, I can play with the opacity of the lettering, the highlights and or the halo itself to get my desired look. I can change the color of my smoke as a whole or Offset Path by Offset path to get different looks. Well, there you have it, a little trick for adding a custom look to your business cards, posters, fliers, or webpage artwork. Enjoy!


Note: As a rule, this kind of effect should only be used for short lines of text/a few words at most.


Ghost Graphics in Corel Draw


1. Select Text Tool (F8), choose size and font, position and type.


2. Under the Arrange function select “convert to curves”


3. Under the Edit Tab select “select all, objects”, then copy


4. Paste second set of letters slightly askew over the first set of letters


5. Under the Edit Tab select “select all, objects” 6. Choose the “front minus back” icon


7. Under the View Tab it might be helpful to select “normal” instead of wireframe to visualize this new creation


8. Under the Effects Tab select “Lens” and select “transparency” from the associated drop down menu and select the desired level of transparency %


9. Import the picture you want to overlay and place the ghost lettering in desired location.


10. You may need to go under the Arrange Tab to arrange layers so that the ghost graphic shows


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