Creating Wood Inlay Art With

Aspiring to create stunning wood inlay art but held back by a lack of drawing skills or reluctant to invest in vector art or design files? Don’t worry, all you need is a dash of creativity and a basic understanding of digital design tools. In this guide, I’ll walk you through how you can harness the power of Corel Draw or similar design software to transform basic shapes into a complex design.

Before you embark on your design journey, it’s crucial to become well-acquainted with the software you’ve chosen for the task. Whether you’re working with Corel Draw, Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape, or Silhouette Studio, each of these tools has its unique set of features and commands. However, they all provide the essential tools you need to bring your own designs to life.

The Concept

This design features a pumpkin, serving as a vase, brimming with an array of beautiful flowers - Sunflower, Zinnias, Delphinium, Coneflower, Pansies - and a Willow Branch. In order to create the Fall Floral Pumpkin I only used three shapes, an ellipse, rectangle and star. Using these three basic shapes as a starting point, I resized, rotated, and adjusted nodes. Additionally the Weld and Simplify Tool were indispensable for helping to fine tune each individual component of the design by allowing multiple shapes to be combined together, or trimmed to create a custom shape. Lastly the Segment Delete Tool was utilized to add scored line details.

Refer to the comparison table above to locate the equivalent tool names in your chosen software. Note that while tool names may vary across different platforms, their functions remain similar. This guide will continue to reference Corel Draw tool names for consistency, but be sure to substitute the correct tool from your software as you follow along.

Building the Floral Arrangement

I began this design by creating a central pumpkin vase. The Ellipse Tool was used to create five similar sized ovals to form the body of the pumpkin. Here, the Simplify Tool was important because it allowed for overlapping portions of objects to be easily removed, leaving the visible portion of objects remaining. For this design, utilizing the Simplify Tool on five overlapping ovals creates the quintessential segmented look of