I was working on a project where I wanted to add a distress pattern. I knew immediately that I could find a great pattern in our Textures Unleashed collections and it was just a matter of finding the perfect one. I ended up using one called Ink Vein Marble from Volume 10. The benefit of using a seamless texture is that I can fill whatever sized bitmap I need and there will be no visible seams. My pattern can therefore be any size I need.

Once I had filled the appropriate area in Corel PHOTO-PAINT, I converted the entire graphic to a black and white bitmap. Below you can see a small portion of the distress pattern I created in only a couple of minutes.

The key is getting a black and white bitmap. I imported the full bitmap (only a small portion is shown above) as the top object in my design. With the bitmap selected, I left click on the X in the CorelDRAW color palette to convert everything you see as white into transparent. Then I right-click on white to convert what were black lines in the bitmap to white and thus knocking out parts of the artwork. Creating the distress pattern and putting it to use took less than five minutes total!