Thread: Avatar Tutorial
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Old 17-11-2006, 23:17   #15
QueenBee QueenBee is offline
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Join Date: Dec 2002
Location: where everybody knows my name
Age: 34
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Posts: 11,792

Okay, here it is, how to add text... I had to do this a bit quickly because I'm off to eat dinner. I thought I'd show you in greater details, some of the things you could do, but I don't have time.

Adding text to an avatar
First of all, I must say that the 04 fonts are very popular when making avatars. They are those that work best when small and sharp, which is why they're awesome for a small picture such as an avatar.

But of course, you can use any font you want... here are some font sites:
http://www.1001freefonts.com
http://www.acidfonts.com/
http://www.dafont.com/ - I use this quite a lot.
http://simplythebest.net/fonts/

Okay, so now that we have our font, let's begin!
I'll be using the 04 fonts, 04b08 to be exact.

I'll be using our previously made Tatu-avatar for this.

Now let's go to our tool palette and find the text tool... Ah! There it is. It's the one marked with a "T" if you're colorblind

If you look up, you will find a bunch of settings.

Here is what they mean:
- With this one, you choose what font you will use.
- With this one, you choose the size of your font.
- With this one, you can choose if your text will be smooth, sharp, strong, etc.
- With this, you choose whether your text will be aligned to the left, right, or in the middle. This does not mean what placement it will have on the picture! You can move the text around as much as you want.

This is how it changes the placement:
left - middle - right

- With this one, you can choose what color your text is.
- With this one, you can make your text wiggled and wavy etc.
- This one opens up a new window with most of these settings and also settings for how far apart the letters are and smaller details like that. Try it

As I said, I will be using a 04 font here, these are the settings I used:
Ta-daaaaaa

This is obviously VERY free to play around with! Just remember that if your text is too huge, it won't fit in the avatar. But that can be made pretty too. It's really up to you to make it look good.

I created a text-box by dragging with the mouse in the middle of the pic. I then just wrote "Tatu". Sorry, I didn't know what to write because my imagination sucks.

Eeewww.. ugly. Let's change that

Look at the layers palette, our text layer is there and marked with a "T"

Then click the little button! (Can you see it? )

Now, you'll see a menu with a whole bunch of different things like Drop Shadow, Stroke, etc. but if you click on "Blending options" you will get all of these effects and can choose from them. I suggest when you've gotten used to what these things do, you can just click on "Drop shadow" and go directly to the settings for drop shadow, instead of looking for it in the list. Yeah I know this seems very strange, but look at what happens when you press "Blending options!"

This is what happens! Now look to the left, those are a bunch of fun things to play around with. They can really change the look of the text.

I got to "Stroke" to put a border around our text. These are the settings I used. See, if we had chosen "Stroke" from the menu at first, we would wind up here instead of having to choose it from the list.

I press okay and now it looks like thiiiiis, w00t! But it's in the middle of the whole thing, bleh.

So I move it by using this tool and just dragging the text around...

...to the corner!

Yay, we have text now!
Obviously, this is just very simple... so it's up to you to use different fonts and settings. If you also switch around the layer options (that I showed in the previous tut), you can create something like this.

Hope you get what I mean.. now go make those avatars!
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Monika | TatySite.net t.E.A.m. [ <3 ] [ 11 ]
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