| - Start a new document 500x500 (it is a good size for this example, but you may want to try small for icons or bigger for printing). I'll choose white background for the sake of this tutorial. |
| - Select the Polygon Tool (or click U) |  |
- Let's take a look at this tool options on the top bar. Make sure you set your settings like the ones bellow:
- Sides: 3
- Radius: none set
- Smooth Corners: de-selected
- Star: de-selected |  |
- Now that we have the tool defined, go to your workspace and click right on the middle, drag it out until you have a perfectly lined up triangle.
|  |
| - If you're using the default colours you should now have something like this after defining the triangle: |  |
- Click on the layer you've created, name it 'triangle' and then right click it, now select 'Blending Options' (or double-click the layer). This is were the magic starts to happen.
|  |
- In the dialogs that shows up we are going to define 2 parameters: Color Overlay and Stroke. Use the following values to achieve the same effect:
|  |
| Stroke values:
- Size: 20px
- Position: Outside
- Blend Mode: Normal
- Opacity: 100%
- Fill Type: Color
- Color: #000000
Color Overlay values:
- Blend Mode: Normal
- Color: #FFCC00
- Opacity: 100%
Click OK.
It looks nice, but lets keep going!
|  |
- Now, let's add some spice to it. Let's make a thunderbolt!
Select the Pen Tool (or press P)
|  |
Select Pure Black (#000000) as your foreground colour and start clicking on your workspace to create control points.
Note: When you click the first one you created, Photoshop closes the shape. You can still edit this shape, don't worry about getting it wrong at the first time. Using the tools inside Pen dialog you can drag, add and delete points, add and delete curves in each control point, etc.
Make sure you explore this feature because it's very important, neat and powerful.
Here's my thunder already completed. Take your time do do yours. ;-)
When complete name this layer 'bolt'.
|  |
| - Open the file 'texture.jpg' and go to menu:
Select > Color Range
Choose 'Sampled Colors' as your select mode, drag the fuzziness slider to 200 and click any dark area in the image until you get something like this: Click OK.
This will automate the selection of an area of the image through its color.
|  |
- Align the selection with your existing triangle and create a new layer - name it dirt - (if necessary drag the layer to the very top of existing layers) and fill it with black: simply choose #000000 as your foreground color and press Alt+Backspace on your keyboard or use the menu Edit > Fill.
You should have a nice texture that will age our sign (and give it more style) but it's coming out of the borders.
|
- To correct this make sure you have selected our 'dirt' layer, now hold Ctrl and click the 'triangle' layer. This will create a selection with the triangle's shape.
Click 'Add Layer Mask' on the bottom of the layers panel and it's done!
|
 |
The texture
|  |
Here we will create a yellow sign with an aged and dirty look.
