When creating any design for an electric sign, there is usually an opportunity to show off the illuminated features in a night-view illustration. As any good sign salesperson can tell you, the night view can do as much to sell the sign as the day view or fabrication drawings; it’s the eye candy of presentations.

 

A night view drawing illustrates what the sign will look like at night to give the customer a better understanding of which parts of the sign illuminate and which do not. I work in Coreldraw X5 because I like the way it utilizes anti-aliased bitmapping and bitmap editing through its bundled program called Photo-Paint X5.

 

To get started, I opened a new document page and selected a scale, imported my title block and designed a simple monument per the specifications of that loyal old client of mine, the Charboneau Bistro. For this exercise I used a very basic day-view placement photo and set it in the background. I then placed the vectored monument sign graphic on top of the photo and positioned it into place. (See Image 1) Since the background photo is a bitmap and the monument illustration is a vector graphic, they will be independent of each other until we choose to merge the two together. 

 

Image 1

What to light up

On any monument sign display there can be a number of illuminating elements such as up-lights, neon borders, halo-lit RPC letters, face lit tenant panels and perhaps an EMC. It’s now time to let the sun go down so we can see how this might look at night. I will walk you through this process in four easy steps.

 

Step 1: Create vector duplicates for later use with bitmap editing: 

Creating duplicates of your original can be a huge time saver if your bitmap editing doesn’t go as planned, you accidentally hit a wrong key or the client wants to see additional color variations. It allows you to start over without having to start from scratch. Select the vectored monument sign graphic, duplicate it and move the duplicate to the right or left of the page for later use. Do this twice so you have two extra vectored graphics to play with in addition to the original still located on the photo. Next, duplicate the background photo and set it off to the side. You should have two complete monuments and one daytime photo sitting off to the side of your drawing page. 

 

Now, using the monument sign that is sitting on the photo—we will refer to this as the “working drawing”—carefully select each of the elements that will illuminate on the sign and “cut” them to your clipboard all at once. We will paste them back in place after the sun goes down on our drawing. You should now have a day view background photo in the background with a bare monument sign cabinet sitting on the top layer. (See Image 2)

 

Image 2

Step 2: Creating the day view/night view background image: 

Select the bare cabinet and the day view photo background and click on the bitmap tab/convert to bitmap to create one single bitmap image. (See Image 3) This new bitmap will allow you to uniformly darken the background photo and the monument cabinet at the same time. Select this new combined background photo and click the “edit bitmap” tab. This will automatically open Photo-Paint and place your photo in a new Photo-Paint document. 

 

Image 3

Step 3: Adjusting darkness... how dark is too dark:

For this we are going to keep things simple by using only the Brightness/Contrast/Intensity tool to make our bitmap lighting adjustments. Once you get the hang of this, you can play with the plethora of editing tools for creating more advanced lighting effects. Now that you are in Photo-Paint, click on the “Adjust” tab and you will see a drop down list. Select “Brightness/Contrast/Intensity” and a dialogue box will appear (See Image 4). As you can see, I have darkened the image by adjusting the three controls until I got a night view image that is dark enough to look like the evening, but not so dark that the sign cabinet disappears in the shadows. 

 

Image 4

Once you are happy with the darkness and contrast level of your photo, it’s time to save it. By closing Photo-Paint and clicking “Save,” the changes you made to the image appear in the Coreldraw “Working Drawing.” No need to search or import the photo—Photo-Paint makes it effortless by transferring the changes you made to your working drawing. You may now understand why you have a couple duplicated images around your workspace; you may need to make minor adjustments to colors and shading and having extra duplicates of your original artwork makes starting over easier than starting from scratch. 

 

Step 4: Bringing it back into Corel X5 as a working drawing 

At this point the boring stuff is done and it’s time to give this sign some night view excitement. You should now have your newly created night view photo with the stripped down monument cabinet as your working drawing in Coreldraw. Remember earlier you “cut” the illuminated elements from the monument sign and left them on your clipboard. Are they still there? Click on the edit tab and select “Paste.” This will drop your illuminated elements right over the new night view photo you created. Tada... the illuminated items fall into place and naturally appear to be illuminated on the page; they were not affected by the Photo-Paint adjustments. It’s really that simple. (See Image 5)

 

Image 5

The Finishing Details

Now that your drawing is about done, you can spice it up with some other graphics like the moon, stars, planes, comets, space ships or uplights, etc. You might try using different colors for your drop shadow “glows” that surround message centers and RPC letters. Experimenting will help you develop a system for whipping these out quickly, and with the right effects your night-view drawing can become the flagship illustration of every presentation.