Photoshop Tutorial: Creating a Distressed TItle
Today I am going to share with you one of my favorite digital scrapbooking tricks: distressing text. I love the look of distressed type—especially with a grungy textured layout, like this one I created about my niece:
When I first added the text to my layout it looked out of place and as if it were floating a bit. By distressing it the text looks more like it belongs on the page and it no longer looks like it is floating. It was really easy and fun to achieve this look.
Here are the steps that I took:
In this first step a selection marquee is created, and will be used as a stencil.
Because the marquee selection is being used, the brush work will only appear in the selected area.
For this tutorial I used Just the Basics: Grunge Brushes & Overlays Set One, but any grunge brushes would work. I used several brushes in a variety of sizes until my type had the texture and amount of distressing that I wanted. The result was a bit of a rubber stamp texture.
There are a lot of fun possibilities with this technique. After you have your text all painted in how you want, you could recolor that layer, use it as a clipping mask with patterned paper, or you could even add a gradient to it.
Another way that this technique can be used is with shapes. Photoshop has a ton of built in shapes that you could use as a ‘stencil’ or you could use tags, alphas and elements from your stash. All you need to do is click on the thumbnail of the element or shape layer (while holding the ctrl/cmd key) , hide that layer, create a new layer and add your brushwork!
Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed this tutorial!
