Photoshop Graffiti

Chad Neuman

Painting with the paint brush or adding text to an image in Adobe Photoshop CS3 can be a fun and useful effect. But a few extra steps can make the look more realistic, as you’ll see in this tutorial for adding graffiti to a brick wall.
Step 1
Open a photo with a brick or cement wall in the background. You can open the support file to follow along with this example.

Step 2
Next, choose the Text tool and change the font to a graffiti style.
If you don’t have one, go to www.1001freefonts.com/graffiti-fonts.php, download one for your platform, and install it. For Vista, after unzipping the folder, just right-click on it and click Install. Close and re-launch Photoshop so it can recognize the new font.
I chose the Brooklyn Kid font.

Step 3
Click the Text tool and type some text to create a new text layer. Select a color. I made the text using a blue, #0f23e0.

Step 4
In the Layers palette, change the Layer Blending Mode of the text layer to Multiply.

Step 5
The effect doesn’t look too realistic yet, since there are a few more steps.

Step 6
With the text layer selected in the Layers palette, go to Layer > Layer Style > Stroke. Change the color to a different one from the text color. I chose #b8212f. Change the Size to 5 and the Blend Mode to Multiply.

Step 7
The text does have the same texture as the brick wall behind it, but it needs to look more realistic.

Step 8
Let’s mask out some of the text to make it look more like real graffiti. With the text layer selected in the Layers Palette, click the Add Layer Mask near the bottom of the palette.

Step 9
Click the white box (the mask) in the Layers palette. Click the Brush tool and change the brush to Splatter 27 pixels, or something similar.

Step 10
Change the Foreground color to black, and with the mask selected in the Layers palette, paint black around the edges of the text and occasionally on top of the text. Of course, black won’t show up, but you’ll be masking out parts of the text. If you mask out too much, paint white onto the mask to recover the pixels. It looks grungier now and more realistic, almost as if a layer of paint faded in parts to show the bottom layer.
Use the left and right brackets to make the brush smaller or larger.

Step 11
Let’s add a few more touches. Click the New Layer icon on the Layers palette, then change the Layer Blending Mode to Multiply. Change the Foreground color to the same color as the inside text. In my example, it’s #0f23e0. Click-and-drag with the same brush you used earlier or another to create more graffiti designs around the text.

Step 12
Add a Layer Mask to this new layer and mask out parts of it by using the same method explained in steps 9 and 10. Try setting the Foreground color to gray instead of black to partially remove some pixels.
The final graffiti effect looks like the real thing.

Chad Neuman is an internationally published freelance magazine writer, graphic designer, photographer, and educator from Florida. Subscribers to his mailing list receive very occasional updates and free vector art/graphics. Subscribe through his Web site at www.chadneuman.com.