Examples of Fancy Text in Paint
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Using a Photograph 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 |
Ocean—Using a Photograph as Background
This was made the same way as the “Trees” example, but a seaside picture was used as the background.
Oblique Stripes
Oh dear! These are like one of those optical illusion things that make you feel dizzy. You wouldn't use them to make a great impression! OK for fun things, though.
To make the background, I zoomed in to 8x, went View > Zoom > Show Grid, and drew a few vertical lines with the line tool. I used the second last line thickness, which is 4 pixels. Once I had a few lines I zoomed back to normal view, selected them, held Ctrl and dragged a copy. I was careful to position it so that everything lined up exactly. Then I selected the new, larger lot of lines and Ctrl dragged those. When I thought I had enough, I selected the whole lot and went to the Image menu, where I chose Stretch and Skew. I typed 20 into both the Vertical and the Horizontal places.
My first idea of “enough” was wrong. Because the typed text was horizontal and the background was not, I needed a much bigger piece of background to fill all the text. It should be about twice as high as the text before you skew it.
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Spraycan Background
Using the spray can and the widest spray, I chose autumn colours and made a small patch of spray about the height of the intended text. I selected it and went Ctrl drag click until the piece was long enough. Then I selected the whole thing and held Shift while I dragged it around just a little, mainly to get rid of most of the underlying white.
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Stretched Spray Pattern
I used the spray can for this one too. I sprayed a few colours, then selected the sprayed area, grabbed it by one corner and stretched until I had the width I wanted. I stretched it down a bit as well until I had the necessary height. Each pixel of colour became a block.
Add an Outline
Since this font has lots of straight lines, I thought it'd be fairly easy to give it an outline. With curves you have to proceed pixel by pixel, but this took hardly any time. I used the line tool set on two pixels so that the outline would show up. The result is a bit jaggy, though.
Change the Colours
I thought that this was an interesting font and wanted to play a bit more, so I put a strong blue onto my right mouse button, kept red on the left one, clicked the eraser tool and rubbed around the edge of each letter with the right button depressed.
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A Font with Shadow
The background here is just sprayed colour, stretched a little.
This was a bit disappointing. I wanted an outline font, but couldn't find one, so I settled for this. To begin with, the glyphs aren't totally enclosed, so I had to join front to back. The red lines on the second black “H” show where this had to be done
Even then, the whole effect is a bit “so what”. I tried changing the colour of the shadow, by replacing both pink and yellow pixels with grey. Much better! You might also try using a single-pixel straight black line on the tops of the letters.
Massed Flower Background
This one is my favourite, and lots easier than you'd think. I just selected this little group of flowers and held the Ctrl key while I dragged and clicked repeatedly. I did not try to get the pattern “even”. Once I had a big block of flowers, I continued with the text mask part of the operation.
If you want to use these flowers, you can zoom in and change the colours to your own preference. Just don't use white, though, because everything behind would show through.
About White in Backgrounds
If you do want some white in a pattern, use another colour in its place until you've done everything else. Then use the colour rubber (white on right button, temporary colour on left button, drag over the picture with the right button pressed down) to change it.