When Mark attended our workshop, he was in the process of moving to Hawaii. We figured we would celebrate his move with a tropical theme. After a little head scratching, we settled on a palm leaf for his name plate. The lettering style is very casual and the leaf was quickly drawn directly in EnRoute.

We took a screen capture of the result and then used a big fat, soft brush to draw the leaf’s outline on a new layer in Adobe Photoshop.

When creating bitmap textures, it is important to keep in mind that black does nothing, white will raise up (or lower down) the most and various greys will sit somewhere between those extremes.

After deleted the screen capture layer, we saved the bitmap so that it would be ready to be imported it into EnRoute.

Next, we selected the vector and created a flat relief.

After this, we used the oval vector to modify the leaf relief with the dome tool.

Next we imported bitmap we had created earlier and positioned over the leaf shape. We used a .75" value in the parameters which meant it raised up the white .75"

Combined with the previous dome shape, it was looking pretty fine!

The separate stem relief was created next using the dome tool. The resulting relief was modified with the oval vector and then nudged to the right height.

The lettering outline was next, first as a flat relief and then modified with the oval.

Then he oval vector was used to create a plaque for the background. We used the bevel tool but limited the height to give the plaque a bevelled edge.

Lastly, everything was “merged highest” before we added the slightly domed lettering.