3D Wire Text
page twoOnce you have the nine by nine outline of little one pixel dots, make a tight selection of the square with the rectangular marquee tool. Remember, you can reposition a selection outline as you are dragging it by pressing the spacebar while still keeping the left mouse button pressed. “Snap” also helps when selecting something this small. Your selection should look like this.
With the selection drawn, choose Edit > Define Brush. Give it a name, if you like. I called mine 1x9x9 Gradient.
In the toolbox, choose the paintbrush tool. In its options bar, click on the little down arrow next to the brush thumbnail to access the pop-up brushes palette. Your new brush should be the last one in the palette. Select it.
After you’ve chosen it, click on its thumbnail in the options bar (not in the palette—that will only get you the Name dialog). Clicking on the thumbnail of a brush in the options bar brings up the Spacing dialog. Set the brush’s spacing to 10 %. This is very important. The brush doesn’t look nearly as good at the default 25 % Spaciing setting.
After setting the spacing, click the little Save icon in the upper right corner of the box, see above. This will save your brush with the correct spacing. A second copy of the brush, this one with the correct, saved Spacing will appear in the brushes palette. You’ll need to go back and delete the first instance of the brush which has the default spacing.
Okay. You have your brush. Now, what to do with it? You can draw freehand with it, but other than having a ton of fun making slinkies, and snakes, I haven’t found anything really useful to do with it that way.
However, it looks fairly interesting if used along with text. Below are examples of handwriting and typed text.
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But the letter S is sort of convoluted.
You can’t really make text any smaller than this. You can scale it some without entirely losing the wire effect. Since the dots making up the brush are one pixel in size, the brush itself can’t be made any smaller. I tried it with fewer dots, and it wasn’t nearly as nice.
To add the wire mesh to text, I used the Stroke Path command in the Paths palette. I’ll show you how, next.
Continue on page three
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Copyright © 2004 by Jay Arraich.
All rights reserved.
All photographs copyright ©2004 by Jay Arraich
jay@arraich.com
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