All of us have seen oil button used in web for navigation or something else. This buttons attract us with their clear and oil design. Somehow we want to get them with hands, to examine, to touch. If we want to use this buttons later when making some page for magazine, some poster, etc. we have to make this buttons is some vector-graphics program such CorelDRAW.

If you new in CorelDRAW you can visit Step by Step tutorial for CorelDRAW.

We choose circle form for the button. This means that we need first to draw circle in CorelDRAW and to color it.

Tip: For drawing circle you can press and old Ctrl from keyboard while drawing with Ellipse Tool [F7].

Circle is ready, but he looks flat, something like without volume, just a red spot. If you look our original button you can see that he have highlights and shadows. Exactly these artistic parameters give to him this volume.

To add volume to this red spot we need to color it with suitable color gradient which give to the circle the right shadows and highlights. You can make this with Interactive Fill Tool instrument from Toolbox pallete.

Next left click on the circle to select, click again and hold, drag diagonally upon the circle and relase. Now you have start and end points for your gradients. These two points can be described with position and color. The exact gradient will appear between them. Also you have scroller at the middle of gradient path with which you can specify the how linear have to be the gradient and on which stroke must be the most gradiented part.

Now you can move the two points upon the circle to position them and get better result. When you finish click on the two colors in Property Bar one by one to select the right colors. For top-left point this need to be the active (in our case this is red) color and for bottom-right black color. Next click on Radial Fountain Fill to make circle gradient. Make sure that your internal point of Radial Fountain Fill is the red point and the external is black point. If no, change color of the points.

Next select Interactive Drop Shadow tool , click on the circle to select, place both first and second points at the center.

Now we have realistic 3D red ball but still something missing. The two highlights - white spot reflections at the top and bottom of the ball.

Draw one white ellipse, place at the top part of the ball and go to Effects/Lens... Now select Transparency lens and choose 25% for rate. Click on Apply button.

Next go to Bitmap/Convert to Bitmap menu. Select RGB color and 300dpi for resolution. Turn on ‘Anti-aliasing’ and ‘Transparent Background’ checkboxes and click OK

Now from Bitmap/Blur/Gaussian Blur… choose ~8px for Radius, click on preview. If result satisfies you click on OK button.

For the second highlight spot at the bottom Copy/Paste the first spot which you already make it. Place at the bottom and resize it like we shown on the picture bellow. Now select Interactive Transparency Tool from Toolbox palette and place the both start and end point for the transparency. Move slider to get the best result, which you want.

That’s all. Now you have cool 3D oil buttons.