There are lots of fonts and Photoshop brushes out there that will give you the effect that you see below but creating your own headings with a pencil and a piece of paper can be quite satisfying – A bit like growing, cooking and eating your own vegetables. The end results will also be unique so you know you’ve created something from scratch.
The effect below will give you a hand rendered text effect that can be applied in a number of ways using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. It doesn’t have to stop at just text but this tutorial will take you through one way of getting hand drawn text into your PC generated artwork:
Step 1
I used InDesign to create my template heading and outlined the text with a thin light grey keyline. Make sure the font size is large enough to fill the paper you are going to print out onto as this will improve the quality of the end result.
Step 2
Once you’ve printed out your template, grab a pencil and start filling in the white space. You don’t need to be too precise – sometimes scruffy rendering gives a better result.
Step 3
Once you’ve filled in the text it’s time to scan your artwork. If you have a good enough camera you can take a photo too. The higher the resolution the better.
Step 4
You may need to adjust your scanned artwork in Photoshop to make the strokes a little clearer and the background a bit whiter.
Step 5
Once your happy with the clarity and white and black levels, use the marquee tool and copy the scan and paste into Illustrator
Step 6
With the bitmap selected choose ‘Object > Live Trace > Tracing options’. In the pop up box you have, play around with the options but make sure you have ‘Preview’ checked so that you see the effects. I kept the ‘Mode’ at ‘Black and White’ as I want a simple vector shape at the end.
Step 7
Now that you have created a trace you need to expand your object using ‘Object > Expand’ and be sure to expand object and fill. Once that’s done ungroup everything (you might need to ungroup a couple of times). Un-select everything and click on the white behind your traced object and delete it. Getting rid of the background means we have a nice clean, transparent vector.
You can use the Magic Wand tool to help just select one colour.
Step 8
Once you have removed the white background from the trace, select the traced artwork, make sure it’s a single colour. Save the vector and it’s ready to use.
Step 9
You can copy and paste the vector into Photoshop as a shape layer which means you can resize without compromising quality.
Hope this is useful.
Really nice tutorial!
Pretty cool tutorial! Thanks for sharing.
Very nice (and timely). I am currently working on creating my own “type” with my own hand written scribble using felt markers and highlighters. I’ll let you know how it turns out. thanks for the post.
I found this article to be extremely helpful.