Tools Guide: How to make Watercolor Word Art Using Photoshop

Thursday, November 5, 2015

How to make Watercolor Word Art Using Photoshop

My lovely blogger friend, Lucy, over at Craftberry Bush, and I are teaming up to bring you guys some super fun Watercolor Freebies, and a super cool tutorial on how to use them in Photoshop.

Head over to her post HERE to grab the watercolor freebies, and read the post below to see how you can use them to create "Super Awesome Watercolor Word Art" for your home in Photoshop!

Start by opening up a blank canvas in photoshop. Make sure you are working with a file that is much larger in resolution than what you intend to print. by doing this, your prints won't come out pixelated. I like making my files at least double the size, so if I'm making a print that will go on a 8.5x11" then I will make it 17x22".

Next, write out your desired text. You can do a combination of words and images, like all of my graphic freebies, found HERE. Just make them all one consistent solid color. The fonts I used here are called "FFF Tusj" and "Freebooter Script"

Once you are happy with your design, link them all together.

Go to "Layer" and click "Merge Linked." If you don't have multiple layers, see the below step. Otherwise, just skip to the next step.

If you are not working with multiple layers and are only using one text layer, instead of doing the above step, just right click the layer and rasterize it.

Add your background of choice to your photoshop document. You may need to re-size it to fit your file, but you can usually do this manually by pasting it into your photoshop document and dragging the boxes on the corners to make it larger or smaller. I suggest working with high resolution backgrounds that need to be re-sized to a smaller size, that way you won't loose image quality.

When contiguous is unchecked, you will have to only click ONCE to grab all the merged graphic, instead of multiple clicks. To see a more detailed example of how to use the magic wand tool, visit my post HERE.

Now that we have our selection, switch the layer to the watercolor texture.

Here you are making a new layer that is a perfect combination of BOTH of your two previous layers.

Press save and you are done!

But I have a few more ideas for you to play around with:

You could do this one by making the background lighter or darker than your text. And easy way to do this would be to just lower the opacity on one of the layers.