Project1.Graffiti


Project 1. Graffiti

I live in a suburb of a fairly large North American urban center, so graffiti is not something new to me. In fact, the way things are these days, I don't even have to go into town to see a good amount of graffitithere happens to be a good bit of it here in my own neighborhood. Notice that I didn't say good graffiti, but a good bit of graffiti.

Although I do enjoy some of the "art", I don't agree with unsanctioned graffiti, whether it's painted on private, public, or commercial property. That said, doing some of your own digital graffiti can be fun, and it makes a great photo project.

As with some of the other projects in this book, you can go about this one in a number of ways. If you take a look at the wanted poster project in Chapter 6, "Printable Fun for Kids of All Ages," for example, you'll find that I created my own wall using a built-in Paint Shop Pro texture. You can do that with this project, as well, or you can shoot something you like. Of course, if you like, you can use the same image I will be using by downloading (UnionShoesSmall.tif) it from the companion website.

You can see the shot of a very weathered wall that I'll be using in Figure 9.1.

Figure 9.1. A beautiful, weathered old wall.


Regardless of whether you opened the same image, created one of your own, or used another photograph, you'll need something to use as graffiti. One thing you could do is apply a photograph to your image of the wall using a layer blending mode, which is one of the techniques we'll use for this project. If you're handy with CorelDRAW, you could also draw something and import it into the wall image. What I'll be doing, though, is creating a tag (the nickname/signature art that graffiti artists use)…a sort of anti-character.

Let's see, how to begin? What about starting with some of the things I like? I like noodleslove 'em actually. I also love my niece Zoe and Zs are kind of cool, too. Zoe, Z, and noodle…how about Zoodle? That works, because Zoe loves animals. What about dropping the d and the e from the end? That leaves Zool. Okay, we're onto something here. It has a certain ring to it…Zool…. It kind of rolls off the tongue. What about substituting a u for the oo, giving us Zul? I think that will work for a simple bit of graffiti. No one but you and I will know what it means and that will lend it that certain graffiti air, that quality.

Note

You'll see your text appear on the image. Don't be surprised if it's way too big, out of place, not the right font, and so on. We'll fix all those properties and more as we work.


Now that we have the image and the graffiti that we'll be using, we can get started.

With the image open and the graffiti in mind, we can get started. The graffiti I've decided on is some simple text that can be applied with the Text tool:

1.

Make sure the image you'll be using as a backdrop is active by clicking its title bar.

2.

Set the Foreground and Stroke properties to black in the Materials palette. Set the Background and Fill Properties to white in the Materials palette.

3.

Select the Text tool and click somewhere in the image to activate the Text Entry dialog box. Then enter the text. I, being the great graffiti artist Zul, will of course enter Zul. Actually, when I started to play with the settings, I realized that it would look more like graffiti if I used a capital L, so I really entered ZuL.

4.

Using your mouse, click and drag to select the text in the Text Entry dialog box. Selecting it this way will enable you to make changes and have those changes reflected immediately over the image (see Figure 9.2).

Figure 9.2. The digital graffiti in place waiting to be worked on.


There are a couple of Create As settings for text in Paint Shop Pro. You can create text as Vector, Selection, or Floating. I'll use vector for this project because it's best for the design I want: a thin line on the inside of the characters where the u and the L intersect and a thicker line on the outside of all the letters. Having the vector text will work best for that because, if I need to make changes to the text, it's much easier to do so when it's vector-based. Note that you can set the text type from the Create As pull-down in the options bar.

Selection text is simply text that comes in as a selection. Anything you can do with any other selection, you can do with type created this way. For example, you can select Edit, Copy and Edit, Paste to copy and paste an area of a photo that was below the text.

Floating text comes in as a filled and stroked floating selection in its own layer. It's quite useful, but I still want the editability of vector text versus the bitmap text you get with the floating choice.


Tip

At some point, you might want to do something with the text you've entered, like repositioning it within the image. You can do so by clicking the Apply button to apply your text, selecting the tool you need, and so forth. When you're done, you can get back to editing the properties of the type by reselecting the Text tool and clicking the type in the image. Doing so brings up the Text Entry dialog box with your text in it. Don't forget to reselect the text in the dialog box so the changes will appear in the actual text as you make your edits.

The text I used in Figure 9.2 has the following properties:

The Font is Comic Sans MS. I chose this font because it resembles graffiti. You might be able to find another font that you like better. Explore, and see what you can find.

The Size is 12 points. If you use pixels or use a different image, you will probably need to adjust this. Play around and keep an eye on the text in the image until you find a good size. Use Figure 9.2 as a starting point.

I set the font style to Bold to give more weight to the graffiti text.

Because I used only one line of text, the alignment isn't important. If you have more than one line, though, you might explore the centered setting.

I left the Anti-alias setting at Sharp. Antialiasing helps smooth out curves and such, and Sharp is a good setting for a fairly high-resolution image. The other settings include None and Smooth. Experiment with each to see the difference. You might have to zoom in to see the effect each setting makes on the text.

I set the Stroke Width to 4.00. I do want a thicker border, but I can get that in the next couple of steps. 4.00 is what I want for the line that joins the Z and the u and the u and the L.

5.

With all the settings in place for your text, click Apply to apply the text and its settings to its own layer in the image (see Figure 9.3).

Figure 9.3. The digital graffiti text on its own layer.


In Figure 9.3, I've expanded the Vector 1 layer (remember that I chose Vector for the Create As type when I entered the text), so you can see the actual text layer.

Creating the Text Outline

It's time to create the thicker outline I mentioned earlier. Here's how to do so:

6.

Select the Magic Wand tool and set the Mode to Add.

Click in all three letters, or whatever number of letters your graffiti happens to have, so that all the letters are selected.

Click in the black outline of the letters to select the outline and add it to the areas already selected. You should have all the letters and their outlines selected, as in Figure 9.4.

Figure 9.4. Use the Magic Wand to select the letters and their outlines.


7.

Click the icon in the upper-left corner of the Layers palette and select New Raster Layer to create a raster layer for the outline.

8.

Choose Selections, Modify, Expand. In the Expand Selection dialog box, enter 5.

9.

Select the Flood Fill tool and click in the selection to fill it with black. (I'm assuming that the foreground color is still set from the beginning of this project.)

Fine-tune the Outline

At this point, you have some black, blocky text on the image that doesn't look like graffiti so much as it resembles something that might have happened if the spray can had exploded. The next couple of steps will fix that:

10.

Choose Selections, Modify, Contract and enter either 10 or double the amount you expanded the selection by in the previous steps.

11.

Press the Delete key to erase the middle of the selection, leaving you with a nice thick outline.

12.

Select the Pick tool and doubleclick the text in the image. Then in the Vector Properties dialog box, turn off the Fill for the text.

13.

Right-click the vector layer that holds the text in the Layers palette and select Convert to Raster Layer.

14.

Right-click the uppermost layer and select Merge, Down. Then zoom in and use the Eraser tool to clean up the extra lines (see Figure 9.5).

Figure 9.5. Erase the extra outlines from the overlapping letters.


Alternatively, use the Freehand Selection tool to select the areas you need to remove; then simply erase those selected areas by pressing the Delete key.

You should end up with something that resembles Figure 9.6.

Figure 9.6. The finished text outline.


Time to Get Colorful

It has been my experience that most graffiti is quite colorful. So, I think it's time to add some color to the text.

15.

Select the Magic Wand and set the Mode to Add. Click anywhere within the letters to make an initial selection. Click in the remaining letters so that all of the inside of all the letters is selected.

16.

Create a new raster layer by clicking the icon in the upper-left of the Layers palette. Drag the new layer below the layer with the outlined text on it.

17.

Click the Foreground and Stroke Properties icon in the Materials palette, and select a nice bright yellow. Select the Flood Fill tool and click in the selection to fill it with yellow. You might have to click in each letter to fill them all.

18.

Choose Selections, Select None. Then select Adjust, Blur, Gaussian Blur. Set the Radius to 17.00 and click OK.

19.

Right-click the current layer (the one with the yellow fills) in the Layers palette and select Duplicate from the menu. Click the layer below the active one in the Layers palette to activate it. Then turn off the visibility of the layer above the currently active layer.

20.

Select Adjust, Color, Channel Mixer. In the Channel Mixer dialog box, set the sliders to 200 for both the Blue and Green output channels and set them to 200 for the Red; then make sure that the check box for the Monochrome setting is not checked. Doing so converts the yellow fill to a bright red, as shown in Figure 9.7.

Figure 9.7. Adding some color to the graffiti.


21.

Select the Pick tool and move the red fill down and to the right a little. This layer will actually act as a bright drop shadow or 3D effect. Turn the visibility of the yellow layer back on to see how it's coming.

Adding the Final Touches

Phew! Almost there. All that's needed now is to change a couple of layer settings and the graffiti will be complete. Not bad considering you won't have to worry about getting any paint on your hands.

22.

Set the blending mode of both fill layers to Soft Light using the menu in the Layers palette. This allows the brick patterns and textures to show through, making the effect more realistic.

23.

Finally, lower the opacity of the outline layer just enough to take some of the hardness away. I set it to 40 so that I could see the brick through the black outline.

Changing the opacity of the outline and the blending mode of the fills means that we won't need to do any other tricks to help the text blend in, such as adding noise to simulate grain. You can see my final image in Figure 9.8.

Figure 9.8. Darn that ZuL guy and his stupid graffiti.




Corel Paint Shop Pro X Digital Darkroom
Corel Paint Shop Pro X Digital Darkroom
ISBN: 0672328607
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 109

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