Tutorial Category: Corel Draw
Using a few quick steps and some funky mouse moves, you can create a 3D cube in Corel Draw. Let’s get started!
Select the Rectangle Tool, hold down the Control key, and draw out a rectangle. Holding down control will keep the rectangle proportional.
Now select the Pick Tool and click on your rectangle twice. You should see the following:
You can see that there are 8 handles to choose from. Grab the left middle handle and skew the rectangle up. You should get the following:
Now that we have the left side, let’s create the right side. There are a few ways to do this, but I like to use some funky mouse moves to duplicate and mirror a shape. Here’s how.
Using the Pick Tool, click on the shape and you should see the following:
You can see there are 8 handles to choose from. Grab the left middle handle and while holding down the Control key, drag to the right but don’t let go. You should see a duplicate appear but to actually duplicate the shape you must right click on the mouse. It’s a little difficult at first but with practice it becomes very easy.
So to summarize again, you want to grab the left middle handle and while holding down the Control key drag to the right but do not let go. While still holding down the Control key as well as the left mouse button, right click on the mouse to duplicate the shape. You should see the following:
Alright, the only piece left now is the top. Now we could create another rectangle and try to fit it in but that could take a while to try and play with the size and getting it to fit perfectly. So here’s a way I like to use.
Select both the left and right pieces with the Pick Tool. You can hold down the Shift key to select multiple objects. You should see the following:
Again, you see that there are 8 handles to choose from. This time grab the bottom middle handle and while holding the Control key, drag up but don’t let go. We’re going to do that funky mouse move again to duplicate the shapes. So right click to duplicate the shapes. You should see the following:
You may be asking why we did that. It doesn’t look like a 3d cube?! What we just did was create the outline of the top part of the cube! You can now see exactly the size and angles of the top piece of the cube. So now all we have to do is trace it! To make it easier, make sure Dynamic Guides are on. You can do this by clicking on the View menu and making sure Dynamic Guides is selected.
One of the reasons why we enabled dynamic guides is because when you hover over a corner it actually shows you the exact placement of the node for that corner. So while you’re tracing you can hover over each corner and click in the correct spot. Take a look at the examples below:
So using the Bezier Tool, click on each of the 4 corners to create the top piece of the cube. Then you can delete those two duplicate pieces so all that’s left is the 3d cube:
After adding some color and duplicating a few more cubes, here’s what I came up with: