Using the Rectangle Tool, draw a second rectangle, 170 pixels wide by 50 pixels tall. Again, draw the rectangle to the exact size before releasing the mouse button.

Any questions?

Select the new rectangle and then select Mould Tool. (Remember this is a British product!) The Mould Tool is used to apply interactively editable, enveloped shapes to objects, text objects, and groups of objects.

On the Infobar, select the Default Perspective envelope. (The second rectangle button on the Infobar). Drag the bottom corner control handles outward as shown. The modifications are applied in real time.

Disable Snap To Grid ( Window pull down menu).

NOTE: Xara has two kinds of interactive envelope shapes, straight sided and curved sided. The curved sided envelope shapes use Bezier control handles to modify the shape.

Select the larger curved rectangle and apply a solid deep blue fill.

Select the Fill Tool then from the drop down list of Fill Types on the Infobar at the top of the screen, select Linear.

An arrow will appear going from the center of the capsule shape to the right side. Drag each end of the fill path arrow until it is going up and down as shown.

I will explain in a moment how to adjust the color using the Color Editor. For the time being, just pick a deep blue. By default the second color in a Linear Fill is white, which is what we want in this case.

Creating multicolored gradient fills in Xara X is intuitive and painfully simple.

With the Fill Tool and the filled object selected, and the fill path arrow showing, drag a color from the screen palette and drop it onto the fill path arrow. The small icon to the right of the cursor changes to either a thin line to indicate line color, or a square to indicate fill. We want a medium blue fill.

NOTE: Once on the fill path, the color, or additional colors, can be dragged to new positions if desired.

Additional NOTE: Colors can be dragged and dropped onto non-selected objects as well.

To access the Color Editor (covered in the next paragraph) click the small color wheel icon to the left of the screen palette. To add a fill color to a selected object, click any color on the screen palette with the left mouse button. To apply an outline color, click with the right mouse button.

To set the fill color to none, click the cross hatched square with the left mouse button. To set the outline to none, right click the cross hatched square or select None from the Line Width drop down list on the Infobar.

To modify or mix a color, use the Color Editor (click the color wheel icon to the left of the screen palette).

If the Color Editor only shows half what is shown here, click the icon directly under the X button at the top of the menu to display the Advanced Options.

In the Color Editor, you can edit in RGB, CMYK, HSV, Grayscale and RGB Web/Hex modes.

You can name a color by clicking the yellow tag icon to the immediate right of the color drop down list. Click the button to the right of this to convert any mixed color to a web safe color.

Select the colors on the Linear Fill and change their values as shown in the illustrations.

NOTE: If you let the arrow cursor rest over any color on the screen palette, a Tool Tip appears with the color properties.

NOTE within a NOTE: If the colors shown in the Tool Tip are in percentage and not 0-255, you need to change the Color Units setting in the Page Options dialog. (See page 1). On the other hand, if you are specifying color for CMYK printing, use Percentage and not 0-255.