In this tutorial i will show you how to change the dimensions of text by scaling a path created from your text, and then how to achieve an interesting pattern effect by applying a texture made of a processed picture.


1.Start by writing your text on a canvas 600x400 - i used Sans Bold 180px and adjust the spacing by -10 to customise the look to what i think looks good



2. click on your text layer and alpha select your text
3. then go to: Select → To Path, this will create a path from your letter
4. make the text layer invisible and Select → None
5. now go to your 'Paths Tab' and make the path visible by clicking on the eye symbol - it will apear on your canvas in red
6. choose your Scale Tool – this will normally be set to 'Layer', and you need to change it to 'Path'



7. click on your canvas and a grid will appear – Width and Height are usually shown in pixels (px) and i like to change that to percent, because i can visualize changes in percentage better than pixels, but thats just my preference
8. change the dimensions of your text path to something you think looks good:
i choose 105% for Width and 120% for Height



9. Take your 'Move Tool', change the mode to 'Path' as you did with the Scale Tool and center your text path



10. in your 'Paths Tab', click 'Path To Selection', make your path invisible, go to your 'Layers Tab' and create a new transparent layer
11. fill the marching ants with a color of your choice, then deselect

12. Now for the texture effect: find a picture via an image search engine that looks like it could work
i googled: „ocean + wave + beach“ and found this: http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mchrv ... 1_1280.jpg


copy the picture and paste it into Gimp in a new image (because this picture is bigger than the canvas we are currently working on)
13. go to Colours - > Threshold and apply changes until you get a nice texture



14. for the next step, create on your text layer, a 'Layermask – White (full opacity)'
15. click on the Layermask and paste you b/w image – a floating Selection will appear over your text layer



16. what now happens is that everywhere your b/w layer is black, your text will become transparent and the layer underneath it, will shine through. While everywhere your mask is white, it will be opaque.
17. try different things with the floating selection, for example:
use the Move Tool to drag the texture around,
use the Rotation Tool to change the angle
use the Scale Tool to make the texture more „dense“
'Invert' the colors to get a different ratio of transparency to opacity
when you are happy with your result, anchor your layer !



18. alpha select your text, invert the selection, then click your layermask and fill with black, so that everything that is not text will be transparent - we want the bottomlayer to shine through !



19. Now you have your textured text ready for the make up phase:
i applied a gradient: black to grey to the background, changed the color of the text by locking the alpha channel and applying a dark blue to a greyish white gradient and finally stroke the outline of the text.
The text you see on the top of the tutorial has an extra layer under the first layer, stroked again with a gradient, thats why the background doesnt shine through.



For another example of this technique, go to this thread:
viewtopic.php?f=11&t=5755

Esper - Good work onthe tutorial, easy to follow.

thank you he4rty, if we are lucky, you will come up with something cool again
you always do

Esper - I promise I was going for something really simply, created my text and used a tree bark photo I'd taken as the texture for the mask, then I went to create the background and thats where it all went wrong.

I thought I'd try one of my crown mouldings in a radial pattern and coloured with a complimentry gradient to the text but it looked like a speaker and I'd always wanted to create a speaker, so I did.

Thank you Esper, got it saved as pdf to do later today.

Is this text perspective made with gimp ? if yes, I'm curious to know how, because doing a correct multi-point perspective (with the transformation tools) is a bit tedious and if there's the possibility within gimp to achieve a correct one..

as i said, you always come up with something special, very nice he4rty !
tree bark, great idea !!

what kind of pattern did you use for the speaker texture ? i like it a lot

also the effect of the red and turquoise bleeding through is interesting
how does that work ?

The mesh on the speaker was created by using Mavhin's Diagonal scalines pattern.
The blue and red text was done just by having a solid Red text layer just below the blue mask Layer.
As to the perspective of the text, the initial text was mapped with the map object>sphere, then the layer Duplicted, moved below original layer and scaled by -1 pixel then this process was repeated about 10 times, I then centred all the layers, finally I filled all layers apart from the top layer with a grey colour on multiply just to darken the edges.

can we have a link, or could you please attach that pattern ?!

did you do that to each individual letter ???

Esper - The text was scaled as a Block, don't think I,ve got the patience to do each letter.

Here is the diagonal scalines pattern, its very thin black lines on a transparent background, so don't panic when you go to try it out and think it hasn't load it has.

Cool tutorial, cool results everyone!

Here's the Distressed Wood textures. Think one could use them for this effect.

an important message to the world:

AnMal - Nice work, but is that the coffee stain filter sneaking into that image.

@he4rty
thank you for the pattern !
i was a bit surprised its just an ordinary diagonal scanline
definitely doesnt look like one, the way you used it, but i see how you achieved the effect

@K1tesseraEna
thank you for the textures, some of them look very useful !!

@AnMal
thank you for trying my tutorial !
you used some sort of plant, right ?
is it a forrest ?

btw, im a tea guy (yeah, there i said it)

ahah map sphere indeed, I almost forgot this filter.
Thanks !

i tried to map text to a sphere but couldnt get it the same as he4rty
is there a way to change the size of the sphere ? or does this effect only work with short words ?

about the 3D effect done with duplicating and offsetting a layer: that should be a piece of cake with 'the Clone Layer Tool' script
http://registry.gimp.org/node/25422

To map text to a sphere start off with a square image say 600px * 600px, enter the text you want to display and set size of text, make sure you leave a space between text and image border of about 50px. Then make sure you text layer is the same size as the image layer 600px * 600px then go layer scale layer and reduce the width to 300px keep the height at 600px, go layer to image size to make layer the same size as image again without disturbing your newly squashed text . Finally run the map object>sphere and your text should map nicely to the sphere, on the tab orientation the first set of X,Y,Z co-ordinates control the position of the sphere and change the z setting to about .75 will increase the size of the sphere.

awesome ! that worked, thank you !

I played around with this a little bit. The masking of the texture works well. Then I just bumped it a little to give it depth. I'm feeling stones and metals a lot right now so I went with a monochrome approach here.

I really like that look ek22