Oblique Stripes

text5_stripe_garamonda.gif text5_stripe_garamondb.gif

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, overlap between original and copyselected them, held Ctrl and dragged a copy. I was careful to position it so that everything lined up exactly. The place where the copy overlaps the original should not show—and overlapping is much easier to get right than trying to place the copy the correct distance from the original.

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 skewed 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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