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Hello again everyone. For
those of you in the States, I hope you didn't over-indulge too
much during Thanksgiving. Aww, who am I kidding? What is the
point if you don't stuff yourself mercilessly? That's half the
fun, and I wouldn't want to take anything away from it. We did a
bit of traveling during the week, and as a result I am missing
out on my favorite part of Thanksgiving… LEFTOVERS! I'm going to
cure that, as I have a turkey thawing downstairs as I type this.
My imagination is swimming in anticipation of turkey soup,
turkey sandwiches, turkey enchiladas… I'm gaining weight just
thinking about it.
I haven't done much with styles lately, so I
thought we'd just have a bit of fun this week getting back into
the styles palette. Let's take a look at single layer styles,
stacking styles, and applying existing styles created for type
and applying them to other shapes. Believe it or not, I still
receive email about how to apply type or button styles to other
objects, so I'll try to clarify things a bit in this regard.
First, let's just create a few styles using a
single layer and a line of type.
When developing styles, I generally begin with
the bevel and build from there. The last style element I apply
is the drop shadow, primarily so I can get a feel for the color
the shadow should be. I usually don't know this until the
majority of the work is done.
Now we will add a bit of color. I'm going to do
this by first adding a gradient overlay, with the blending mode
set to Luminosity, and then a color overlay set to Overlay.
We sort of have a plastic effect going on here,
so to increase the illusion of plastic we can apply our good
friend Inner Shadow. I'll go ahead and put my drop shadow in now
as well.
That's not too bad. But we can dress it up quite
a bit just by applying a similar style to a layer beneath this
one. Case in point: create a new layer beneath the type layer.
Command/CTRL+Click the type layer in the Layers Palette to bring
up the selection. Go to Select>Modify>Expand, and increse the
selection size by a few pixels. In the layer beneath the type
layer, fill with your foreground color. Apply the same style to
this layer, with mayby just a bit of variation. In this example
I've added a pattern overlay to the new Layer, and a Stroke to
the original type layer just to give the type some seperation
from the new layer. Here's the result:
Now let's clear up the question of type styles
on other objects. Don't let the shape the style is applied to
confuse you. If you have a type or button style, you can still
apply it to another shape or filled are in a layer. For example,
using the styles I just created I can create a shape using the
Custom Shapes tool, and apply the same styles using the exact
process used above. This also works with frames for photos, text
styles to buttons, so on and so forth.
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