How to Make an Airmail Border in CorelDraw

In this tutorial I will be showing you how to create an airmail border that you see on envelopes. I’m using CorelDraw X4 so a few things may work different if you have another version.

Open a new document and choose your size. I chose a business card size (85 x 55 mm).

Choose the rectangle tool and draw a rectangle that is 3.8 mm wide and 70 mm tall.

With your rectangle still selected, click on it again and click and drag the skew arrow (in the middle at the top). Drag it to the right side. Skew it until you get something around 162 in the scale box at the top.

Now remove the outline from the shape and give it a red fill (I’m using C9 M91 Y64 K2). It should end up looking like this:

Move it so that it covers the bottom right corner.

Now duplicate the shape (Ctrl + D) and give it a blue fill (I’m using C40 M40 Y0 K60). Move it to the left of the red shape.

Duplicate the blue and red shapes and start covering the whole of the artboard. Don’t worry about the distance between them isn’t the same, we will fix that later.

You should end up with this:

Select all of these shapes and go to Arrange > Align and Distribute and click on Align Top. This will align all of these shapes. To make the distance between these shapes the same, go to Align and Distribute again and click on Align and Distribute at the bottom:

And click on the Distribute tab and select the spacing check box.

Now group all of these rectangles together (Ctrl + G).

Now, double-click on the rectangle tool in the toolbox and it will create a rectangle that is exactly as big as your artboard. Fill it with white.

Right-click on your group of red and blue shapes and drag it over to the white rectangle until you see a cross-hair symbol. Release and select Powerclip inside.

This works like Photoshop’s clipping mask and your red and blue shapes are now inside the rectangle. You can now right-click on the rectangle and select Lock contents to Powerclip.

Now double-click the rectangle tool again to make another rectangle as big as your artboard. Fill it with white and send it to the front of your artwork (Shift + PageUp).

Make the white rectangle a little bit smaller (I made mine 80 x 50 mm).

We are going to use this rectangle to cut out of the red and blue shapes. Select both the white rectangle and the group of red and blue shapes. In the bar at the top, choose trim.

Now the inside is cut away.

And there is your final airmail border!

You can apply this technique to envelopes, business cards, wedding invitations, anything!

I made these DIY business card templates with the airmail border: