A Little Digital Aerosol Art

STEP 1: I got a plain sheet of A4 paper and drew a few straight lines to Sit my lettering on, then roughly drew the outlines of my lettering. I then went over that with a permanent marker and added a bit of drop shadow to the left and lower edges of the lettering I also waited for the ink to dry before rubbing out the pencil lines with a soft rubber. Then I scanned it in at about 150Dpi I think :)))) Cleaned it up using the LEVELS dialog as shown in loads of my other tutorials and a bit of white airbrushing to clean up all the mistakes I made when I should've waited for the ink to dry as mentioned earlier, heh heh.

STEP 2: OK, I double-click the layer called background and gave it the name 2outlines" this promotes it to a proper layer allowing you to change the settings to "Multiply" as shown, This makes the white bits see-thru to the layers below. Now I used the magic wand to select the interior of a letter then holding shift I clicked and added to the selection selecting all the interiors of each of the letters (you can minus selections by holding ALT and clicking). So now you have all the interiors of the letters selected, create a new layer and drag it below the outlines layer. I named it "colour" as shown, now go to SELECT/MODIFY/EXPAND and expand your selection by about 2 pixels, This just makes sure you have selected a larger area and when you fill it with Blue as shown it will not leave any white scrappy edges.

Click to enlarge

STEP 3:OK, now using the same selection or if you lose it and need to select the text again hold CTRL and click the layer called colour, this automatically selects all pixels on that layer, Quick and cool!!! Now This bit is up to you, I sprayed on loads of shades of blue with the airbrush then used the Smudge tool to push and pull it around a bit, I then kept the selection and created a layer above called highlights, onto which I carefully added some white highlights.

Click to enlarge

STEP4: OK heres the finished pictures, I created several seperate "pieces" using the same techniques shown above then cut them out and pasted them all together, added a Loose colourful background and some other little touches. I did the "Lost in Monaco For...united Cerebral Palsy" Tag style text with a marker on a blank piece of paper, scanned it, changed it to multiply and moved it into positon. Hope you found this Tutorial useful in some way......:)