Tuesday Tip – Easy Graffiti Tag

By Greyson TipSquirrel

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Podcast

Martini Hour 017, In Which Colleen Discovers Deke’s Secret Martini Past (with Bert Monroy)

Deke and Bert in the same place, pure Photoshop gold.

PhotoshopUserTV 188 (JUNE 01, 2009)

Dave and Scott have tutorials. Scott invites everyone to join his Photo Walk and David duChemin is in the studio to talk about his new photography book.

On Line Training

I don’t hide the fact that I’m a fan of Deke McClelland’s training series’, so it was with glee that I read that his latest series at Lynda.com has been released.

Photoshop CS4 One-on-One: Mastery rounds off an amazing training program that, in my opinion, is matched nowhere else. (I’m happy to be proved wrong if you know different). This One-on-One programe now lasts in excess of 48 hours and as Deke says himself “now that’s comprehensive”

A list of all Deke’s courses can be found here.

Tuesday Tip – Easy Graffiti ‘Tag’

First things first, I’m going to need a good font. I head over to DaFont.com and get ‘Mostwasted’

OK, in a new document I choose my new font and type out my word.

Lets not forget that we can alter the lettering as I did in a previous tip buy using the text’s paths.

The colour isn’t important as it is just the letter’s shape we are after right now.

Pressing Ctr/Cmd and taking the mouse over my text layer I get a new type of pointer. This tells me that if I click here it will select the contents of the layer. That’s what I want so I’ll do that.

If I click the eye icon next to the layer the text will go but I’ll be able to see my selection.

I then go to the tools bar and select the Gradient tool

Next I want to get some more graffiti type colours. So I go up to the top and click the gradient.

In the presets there is one that will suit our purposes (if everything is at default. If it isn’t I’d go to that little arrow on the top right and choose Reset Gradients)

So I’m going to click on Yellow, Violet, Orange, Blue

Now, on a new layer, I’ll click and drag a line at a slight angle to make a line. The gradient will follow this line once we release the mose.

So it’s beginning to look a bit like graffiti, but I’m not there yet.

Ctrl/Cmd+D to deselect the selection, then double click on the coloured layer to get the Layer Styles up.

All I’ve added is a stroke and a hefty drop shadow.

But it still doesnt hit home. So lets add a Lens Flare; from the menu Filter > Render > Lens Flare

Here I’m adding the Flare to where the I and the P meet.

Although this looks ok, I’m going to add a couple more. Using the same process of Filter>Render>Lens Flare

And I’ll add one to the bottom of the Y, the top of the Y and the bottom of the T

And there we have it

Have a great Tuesday I’ll see you tomorrow!

Based in the UK, TipSquirrel has what some have described as an 'unnatural obsession' with Photoshop. Although he spends his day either in Photoshop, reading about Photoshop or watching Photoshop Podcasts he's still not able to cobble together a reasonable tutorial himself. Fortunately, he has a talent for persuading very clever and articulate people to do that on his website. An avid Twitter fan TipSquirrel can often be found sharing links from TipSquirrel.com and other sites. This account also has him jibbering away about tea, scones, biscuits and anything else that randomly pops into his tiny little brain. For pure Photoshop links, TipSquirrel has a second Twitter account, Photoshop_nut. TipSquirrel is afraid of crows.