Text exercise

I’m working my way up on the text exercise, starting with “Maine.” Given the title of the exercise, I assume it’s some kind of clipping mask. After clicking around a little, I’m able to select the photo of the trees and copy and paste it into my new document. Next I’ve created a similar text to spell out Maine on a second layer. Those parts were fairly straightforward. Now I’ve come to the part I don’t have a clue where to start…making the clipping mask!

Okay, I have no idea what just happened, but my “Maine” now looks like the one in the exercise. From my very basic photoshop experience, I was guessing that the mask had something to do with the layers. I was rolling the mouse over, and saw that one of the icons said “Make clipping mask.” Great. Now how do I activate it? I selected both the picture and the text and clicked, but it didn’t seem to work. I accidentally clicked somewhere in the layers box, and it worked. So now I’m going to go back and try to figure out what I did!

I’m thinking it has to be a sublayer. For whatever reason, it looks like it doesn’t matter which order the text and picture are included in the sublayer (I guess I’m thinking of photoshop again), because switching them didn’t make a difference. I’m hoping the video later is going to help!

Yes, I’m glad I saw the video, I think the basic concept of the clipping mask makes much more sense now! I ended up starting over with “Maine” and it was much easier. I copied and pasted the picture, and the created the text. I moved the text to the front, selected both objects, and was able to create a clipping mask from the object menu. Then just like the video said, I was still able to manipulate the text to make it look as much like the exercise as possible. Very convenient.

The second one looks like it’s very similar, however this time instead of a picture, it’s text masking a shape with a gradient. I’m able to isolate the layers in the example so I can just see the gradient. I could just copy and paste again, but I’m really not that comfortable using the gradient tool yet, so I think I’m going to try to recreate it. I’ve drawn a rounded rectangle shape first. After looking around on several menus, I found a drop down box up top for the fill. I was able to select a radial gradient, and then use the eyedropper tool to add the colors used in the exercise. Once I found that, things seemed to fall into place! I also learned by accident when I was done that if it’s still selected, you can click to alter the center and size of the “circle” that’s making the gradient. Good to know.

Once I had the gradient created, I made the text, put it on top of the layer like before, selected both objects, and then created the clipping mask. Two down, one to go!

The last one to me looks like it’s a rectangle that’s been divided up, and then the live paint tool was used to create the different colored boxes. And from the layers it looks like two separate of these boxes were created, and then masked. So that’s what I went ahead and did…luckily I did learn some about live paint from the zoo poster project!

I created a rectangle and drew lines to divide up the box. Then I selected everything and went to object, make live paint. Then I selected the colors and filled the boxes with the paint bucket tool. I copied and pasted the lines to create a second box for the other text. Then I created the text, and masked each text box individually as I did before. This one didn’t seem too much harder for me, other than taking the time to create the boxes, so hopefully I didn’t miss something important!

The file is now saved in the drop box! yay!