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How to Create Neon Letters Effect

pull tab card, cross fade card, Venetian blind card, changing picture card


I made this 21st birthday mechanical card recently.   I've seen this kind of card variously referred to as a cross fade card, a Venetian blind card, a changing picture card, and a disappearing picture card.

Whatever you call it, it uses a push and pull tab to change between two pictures.


A version of this card is in my go-to book for mechanical cards, Making Mechanical Cards by Sheila Sturrock.  It is also included in Paper Engineering and Pop-Ups for Dummies by Rob Ives.

But this post is not about the card, it's about the printable neon effect that I made for the lettering and shapes.

How to make neon effect letters
Make it!


There are a number of videos about creating neon-look signs, but they are mostly for Photoshop.
I wanted to use a vector program, so I created my neon letters using CorelDraw.  Don't have CorelDraw? No problem!  You can create neon letters with Inkscape (totally free!)

First, a relatively simple method of creating neon effect letters or neon line-based objects using CorelDraw.

I have created a "neon" Drop Shadow Preset for you.  Download it and install in CorelDraw by dropping it in your Presets Drop Shadow folder.  The path on my computer looks like this.    AppData/Roaming/Corel/CorelDraw Graphics Suite X5/Draw/Presets/DropShadow
I can't speak for all versions of Corel and all computers.




If you prefer to use Inkscape to create neon letters or shapes, here's how to do it.