100 Styles 13 - Lovely Lines - Stripes

Stripes effect (Click the image to see it bigger)

I'm stretching the concept a tiny bit here with stripes rather than lines, but if you want to be strict there is a line per se in the stroke around the letters. Read on for info on how the effect was created as well as some tips for how the background was created. As well as to be able to download the style of course.

Striped text effect

The repeating pattern used for the stripes

Above you can see the simple pattern that makes up the stripes (see below for the Pattern Overlay settings to see how it's used). The size is a bit larger than needed for this effect, but I like to have some room for experimentation so as long as I don't go too far I prefer to use a fairly big size. It's fairly easy to create the above base for the pattern, and it can probably be done in many ways, but here's how I did it:

1. First I created a square document: 128px*128px (It seems to me that "power of two" sizes look better when resized. In other words, a size where the numbers are 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, etc seems to look less blurry etc when used in patterns where they're used at sizes which are relatively far from their original sizes.) White background.
2. Then I created a guide at 50% horizontal. I did that by going to the View menu, and there choose New Guide, and in that dialog enter 50%, then Photoshop automatically calculates what that is in pixels or whatever measurement you're using and places a guide there.
3. Next I used the Marquee tool and, with the help of the guide, I selected half the canvas and filled it with black.
4. Finally I defined it as a pattern by going to the Edit menu, there I chose Define Pattern... and entered a name, clicked Ok and I had the pattern ready to be used in my style.

Drop Shadow settings

Starting the effect, or perhaps finishing it off if you look at it from the most defining to the least, is the Drop Shadow. The effect might work without it, but I think it improves it by adding some depth. The settings are pretty basic, nothing much to talk about, except perhaps the general notion that it's a good idea to scale back effects from their Photoshop defaults. In this case I have only lowered the Opacity a little as the contrast in the image as a whole is pretty large so lowering the opacity too much would make it disappear.

Pattern Overlay settings

The main center of attention, the Pattern Overlay. It starts off very basic, the Blend Mode is Normal, the Opacity is 100%, the Pattern is the one you've seen above, and I guess even the Scale isn't that revolutionary since I told you earlier that I wanted to be able to scale it.

Stroke settings

Again, very basic settings, I've just lowered the Size to, again, make the effect less subtle. The pattern breaks up the outline of the letters slightly, so it's nice to add some of it back by help of the Stroke.

--> Click here to download the style <--

Notes: Some words about the background. It's basically a couple of layers with rendered clouds on them, the top layer is then put in Hard Mix Blend Mode (and yeah, I was playing around trying to find a use for the Hard Mix Blend Mode as it's rarely useful), and has its opacity lowered. Then I've just put a Hue & Saturation Adjustment Layer above them, set to Colorize, to give the background the red color.