 We're going to work through a quick tutorial in CorelDRAW, creating a simple laser cutter project, a plant stake to be specific. So I'm just going to open a new document. And the first thing I'm going to do is create a rectangle for my plant stake. And I'm just going to eyeball that rectangle out using my rectangle tool. And then I'm going to come up here to my sizing tools, and I'm going to manually just type in the length and width I want my plant stake to be. And I'm going to hit Enter to have it accept that. So now I have a one inch by seven inch rectangle that's going to be the basis of my plant stake. Next I'm going to come to my text tool where I'm going to open up a text box and click and type in what I want my plant stake to say. And I'm going to type it all in uppercase letters so that it fits on my plant stake nicely. While I have it in this text tool, I'm going to up my font size a little bit so I can see it better. And I'm also going to make my font choice. I'm going to pick a nice chunky font that shows up well and will be nice and sturdy on my plant stake. We'll go with that one. Other choices I need to make while I'm still in my font text tool is spacing, spelling, and font choice. So if I want to change my spacing between my letters, I can do this over in my paragraph tab under my object properties. And all my font size and text choices are over here under my object properties as well. So once I've made those choices, I go back to my pick tool and I'm going to put my cursor over one of my letters while I right click and convert that word to curves. So I'm turning it from an editable text into a vector object. And I know it's a vector object. When I select it and I go to my shape tool, I get all my curves and nodes that pop up along my word. So I'm going to go back to my pick tool and I'm going to move my word up into the upper left-hand corner of my plant stake just so that it nestles nicely in that corner. And then I can pull from my bottom right-hand corner to resize the word however big I want it on my plant stake. And that looks good to me. The next thing I need to do is I need to convert my rectangle to curves as well. So I'm going to right click on the edge of my rectangle and I'm going to say convert to curves for that. So when I go to my shape tool, it turns blue and now I have nodes. Once I've converted my rectangle, I'm going to go up to my ruler on the top of my page and I'm just going to click and drag down a guideline and drop it right at the base of my word. But I want it to overlap each letter a little bit because that's where my words are going to connect to my plant stake. So I need there to be some overlap. In my shape tool then, I'm going to add a node where those two lines intersect. Right here along the left-hand side of my rectangle and that new guideline I just dropped. I'm going to click and add a black placeholder and then I'm going to right click on that node and add it. And now I have a new node. I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to pull a guideline out of my left-hand ruler and drop it right along the edge of my word. I'm going to leave a little bit of a blank space, a gap, because I think it's easier to read that word with a little negative space behind it. Once I have that guideline, I'm going to add a new node where the new guideline intersects with the top of my rectangle. So I need to click on it with my shape tool and then I zoom in on that intersection, click and drop a black placeholder and then I'm going to right click and add a node there. So now I have two new nodes added on my rectangle right here at these corners. My next step is to take the upper left-hand corner of my rectangle, that node. I'm going to click and drag it down to this intersection created by my guidelines. I'm going to just drop it there kind of roughly and then I'm going to zoom in so I can see the detail and move it a little more carefully right onto that intersection so that my new bottom, I now have a cutout around my letters and the bottom of my stake intersects with every single one of my letters. I'm going to add one more node to finish my plant stake and I'm going to add that node here along the right-hand edge of my rectangle. So I'm going to zoom in and this one doesn't need to be exact. I'm going to drop it somewhere in the center and add a node. This is a node I'm going to pull out for my stake of my plant and it can be however sharp I want it to be. I'm just going to eyeball it. So now I have what's looking like a plant stake. My next step is to go up to my pick tool and make sure I select both my word and my plant stake. I'm going to come over here to my object properties and I'm going to change my outline to hairline thickness and my color to pure red. 255R, zero green and zero blue because that signifies a cut line for the laser cutter. Next I'm going to go to my fill tab and I'm going to change my fill to zero fill for everything to take away the black center of my words. Now that I've done that, I have one more step to create my plant stake. So if I had sent it to the laser cutter like this anywhere there's a red line, it's going to cut which means it would cut my word off of my plant stake which is it what we want. So while both the word and the stake are selected I'm going to go up to my object, drop down shaping and weld so that anywhere my lines overlapped it now creates one solid object. And if you had your lines overlapping like we did you should now have a plant stake where the letters are all connected. So this I could send to the laser cutter and cut out my new plant stake that says basil. My last step is always to go to file save as and save my plant stake as a curl draw document with the selected only check marked so that I just save that plant stake I just made.