lornamatic

Photoshop’s clipping mask tool gives you a great way to add natural textures to typography and clip art. It looks awesome, it’s easy, and it’s really versatile.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to apply a texture to a layer of type. You can use any two images, but you’ll get the best effect with one texture and one high contrast image (something with transparency, such as type or clip art).

Before you begin:
You need an interesting scan or photograph. You can use whatever suits you. I took a plain old pencil and scribbled a 2 x 4″ rectangle, on plain old paper, and scanned it at 300 DPI. Nothing too special.

Step 1:
Create a new Photoshop document. Fill the Background layer with whatever color you like. You won’t be using it for anything besides color.

Step 2:
Create two new layers. Place your text in Layer 1, and paste your texture in Layer 2. Your layers palette should look like this, text at the bottom, image on top:

Step 3:
Right-click the texture layer, and choose “Create Clipping Mask.”
Your text should go from this:

to this:

So hopefully now you get the idea. The Clipping Mask layer is only visible where marks exist on the layer directly under it. That includes graphics, paint brush strokes, pretty much whatever you can think of, with transparency.

This technique works for turning text into fabric, or line art into textured paper, or pretty much whatever you can invent with it. You can make clipping masks on multiple layers with different images and textures, in which case adding a subtle drop shadow creates really nice depth. Here are some other examples to get you thinking.

These tutorials and images are Copyright 2006, Lorna Brown. They are provided free of charge, with all rights reserved. They may not be reproduced without permission.