Fancy Headings
On this page
Shadowed Text Zoomed in Decoration of Capitals Masks Examples About Saving Tips Old PaintBrush
If you want to make an attractive front page for a report or an assignment, you might like to make a fancy headline.
This was much easier to do in the old PaintBrush program that came with Windows 3.1. It offered both shadowed and outlined text—as well as colour changing a whole screen with one double click.
However, all is not lost. You can make some quite nice headlines in Paint.
Shadowed Text
The simplest possible way is to make two copies of your headline, each in a different colour, and drag one on top of the other.
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You can do the same thing with several colours, to get a vaguely extruded look.
Zoomed in Decoration of Capitals
A single capital letter can be decorated pixel by pixel, in Zoom in view. You'd use this in much the same way that a word processor uses a “Drop Cap”, but you'd position it manually on your page in Paint.
To use it in a word processed document, you'd insert it as an image and remove any space between image and text.
(As this picture shows, your spell checker will probably see a spelling error, because it doesn't recognise the image as a letter.)
Masks
More interesting effects can be made quite quickly using a “mask” method. The steps are as follows.
Summary of Mask Method
- Make a fancy background somewhat bigger than the text will be
- Type your text in black
- Select the text
- Invert the colours
- Select the text and drop it over the background
- Flood the mask
- Remove other unwanted areas
- Save your finished work
Step by Step
In these instructions, I haven't said “Save” except right at the end. Please do save your work as you go, though. It doesn't matter what you call it, perhaps masks.bmp. This working file will be big, because you'll use the Windows default setting of 24 bit bitmap, but it can be deleted when you no longer need it.
I wanted a very large heading for an article about trees.
Arrange a Background and Type the Text
To make this, snip a piece from an appropriate photograph.
Having pasted it into Paint, drag it to the bottom of the window. Then click the text tool, drag a text area, and type the word “Trees”, using black.
The Paint text dialogue shows font sizes up to 72. I wanted something bigger. I typed 140 into the size box, then clicked inside the text area. The text increased to the size I wanted. top
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Select the Text and Invert Colours
Now click the rectangular selection tool and outline the text.
Go to the Image menu and click on Invert Colors. It's important to have an active selection when you do this, otherwise everything on the page would have its colors changed.
Drag the Mask onto the Background
Make sure that the transparency option is selected at the bottom of the toolbox and that you have white as your background color.
Drag the still selected text area onto the photograph.
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Flood the Mask with White
Click on the Flood Fill tool. Using your right mouse button, flood the black mask, including the loop of each e.
Save Your Finished Work
Using the Rectangular Selection tool, draw a marquee around the completed lettering.
Since this heading is intended for printing, and it is not going to be included in an email, you should worry about quality rather than disk size.
Save it as a 24 bit bitmap.
If you do want to conserve disk space, then save it again under a new name as a jpg and again a gif. If they look the same, discard the larger ones.
You'll notice that my step-by-step pictures don't match the finished picture; that's because, to make them small enough to put onto this web page, I had to reduce the colours drastically.
Examples
The examples listed below are on separate pages. Each example tells very briefly how I made the background. Under some headings there are some additional tips.
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An Ocean Photo as Background Oblique Stripes Spraycan Background Stretched Spray Pattern Add an Outline Change the Colours A Font with Shadow | Massed Flower Background Using White in a Background |
Tips
You could try combinations of two different ideas. For instance, the Massed Flower text or the Ocean text could sit almost on top of the same words, in the same font, in a plain colour.
Fat fonts work better for this sort of thing. Fine, graceful “handwritten” fonts are better left plain, or just embellished with a shadow.
Take it easy with fancy stuff. Stick to a theme on the whole page—that might include the colour, the font and any decorations. If you have a way-out font for headings, keep the rest of the page fairly conservative. Too many different ideas can spoil a page.
Watch out for All Caps type fonts. In moderation they're fine, but lots of block letters can be wearisome. Also, don't ever use all caps from a “handwritten” type font. It can look so bad!
Use hard to read fonts, like Black Letter, Old English type fonts very sparingly. The purpose of type is communication; if you can't read it almost instantly you'll be annoyed by it.
About Saving
Just how you should save a particular picture depends on the colours in the picture and what you are going to do with it. Because I was putting the pictures on this page onto the web, I copied each one into PSP4, reduced the colours to 256 or 16, and saved as a non-transparent gif image. Those pictures based on photographs were noticeably degraded in 16 colours, but in 256 colours I thought they looked OK; the ones painted using just the basic 16 colours were of course not affected.
If your picture is NOT a photograph, but something you've painted youself in Paint, saving it in 256 colours should be fine. So, in most cases should a scrap of photo used as a background. If you're using a whole photograph on your final page, though, you'd probably need the default format.
There are notes on the Gif or Jpg page (it opens in a new window) about saving for the web. For something you're going to print, I'd strongly suggest that you experiment. Save in the highest format, then save under a new name in a lower format and compare the quality of the two saves. I do this all the time. I usually just add a b to the filename of the second save, a c to the third, and so on. Use the highest format for your working drawings. That leaves your options open—and you're going to delete them anyway.
Old PaintBrush
If you still have your old 3.1 or 3.11 disks, find PaintBrush and try it out. It has limits in colour handling, but in some circumstances that can be an advantage. You may not like it, but you may find it quite useful. Have a go.
If you just copy it into your computer as is, it won't run, because Windows has an instruction to always substitute Paint. You have to hide it from Windows. Here's how:
Make a folder. Call it anything you like. Into that folder put:
- pbrush.dll
- pbrush.exe—but rename it pbrush2.exe
- pbrush.hlp—but rename it pbrush2.hlp
Those renamings are arbitrary. You can use quite different names, like oldpbrush or originalpbrush or even maryanne. You must use the same name for the exe and the hlp, and you must keep pbrush for the dll. Now, if you click up the exe, Windows won't rush in and substitute Paint. Neither will Paint itself be in any way affected.
Finding Photographs
If you have a digital camera, you probably have photos running out of your ears. If you don't, there are still thousands available to you. Every version of Office has photographs included on the CD, as do many graphics programs. There are plenty on the web as well, although you should be wary of “Free Downloads”. Some are for real, but some have spyware included.
Questions or comments? I’d love to hear from you. My email address is here.
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