My Favorite Title Trick

Supplies: Kristin Cronin-Barrow’s Tropical Hideaway

My favorite way to create titles is by using a great font and making it look like an alpha.  Sometimes, I’m just too lazy to arrange letters one-by-one .  Below, I share a play-by-play of how this title was created.

I typed my title word using Clementine Sketch.  With this font, you must start each word with a capital letter and end it with ^ so that you get a fully closed word.  Since the v does not connect with the other letters, I typed the title like this VAcations^ which gave me a completely closed word.

Next I selected the magic wand:

I clicked outside of the word ‘vacations’ (the settings at the top are shown for your convenience):

You will get marching ants on your page that look like this:

Next, you need to invert the selection by going to shft+ctrl+i or select>inverse.  Now, your selection will look like this:

If you look closely, there are some parts that we need to subtract from the selection (the inside of the o and s).  To do this select ‘subtract from selection’ (as shown below) or hold down the alt key while clicking inside the o and s.  You might want to zoom in to help with accuracy.

After clicking and subtracting those areas, they should look like this:

Create a new layer by clicking on the new layer icon:

Make sure that the new layer is below the title layer like this:

Select the eyedropper tool:

Click on a color you want the inside of your text to be, I’m choosing the lighter blue in these papers:

Make sure the desired color is the foreground color:

Now select the paint bucket tool:

With the paint bucket tool, click inside the selection of your title and your selection will be filled with the desired color:

I decided that I wanted my outline to be brown and then add a sticker border.  So, I will select the type layer again in the layers palette:

Now, select the type tool by clicking on it in the tool bar OR use the keyboard shortcut ‘t’.  Click on the color in type toolbar at the top of the window:

Now, I’m going to click on the brown paper and the outline of the title will turn brown:

Now, go to select>modify>expand and below is the settings I chose, feel free to experiment with different numbers:

Create a new layer as we did above and make sure that the new layer is below the text and below the color, like this:

With that new layer selected, choose a white color and then with the paint bucket tool, click inside the selection (just like we did for the blue above):

Now, lets get rid of those marching ants by using the keyboard shortcut, ctrl+d and we have the completed title: