Embellishment #3 - Creative Lettering

Creative Lettering is a fun way to use fonts for titles, notes, cards, websites and scrapbooking. In this lesson we learn how to use patterns, colors and gradients in making a creative lettering title.

Let's start by opening a new raster image 800 x 200 (to give plenty of elbow room) 200 dpi. Transparent background. Here you can find a copy of the font I used for this exercise called "Brice a Bract BV". Save it to your desktop and open it by double clicking the icon on the desktop. (you can move it to a folder later if you wish, or install it in your fonts folder for future use.) Then minimize it. Back to PSP and choose your Text Tool. Colors should be black and a light color, doesn't really matter but not white so we can see where to flood fill.

I chose a cream color. In your Tool Options menu make sure that you have "Create as Vector" chosen, Size is 110 and stroke width is 1. Also check your Bold box and Anti-alias (Sharp). Then in the new image Type the letter IF. Like this

Using the handle (where the red arrow is pointing) tilt the letter either left or right a little bit. As this picture shows, it doesn't have to look exactly like mine.

Then with the flood fill choose a color, pattern, gradient or texture and fill the letter like this. You will get a message that this layer will have to converted into a raster layer, click ok.

Next with the text tool Type the letter UP. Move the letter into place Next to our IF and you will see that we have a new Vector Layer with just the UP on it. You can use the handle again to tilt the letter or not your choice. And again we are going to fill it with a color, gradient, pattern or texture different than the one used previously. Like this

continue on in this fashion creating new layers for each letter. Using your different patterns, colors, gradients and textures and mixing up the alignment of each letter to create a unique title. Until you have spelled out "FUN WITH PSP". As in the Title of this Lesson.

Once you are finished you can merge the layers go to Layers / Merge / all Visible this will retain the transparent background now save as a pspimage, a tube or you can export it as a .png image. .png images are used to create printable scrapbook embellishments and are also loadable in many graphic programs without loosing the integrity of the image. Jpg and gif images compress the pixels to make the image smaller in size, this can make the image seem fuzzy especially if you are going to print it.