After a request from a very good friend of mine came through for how I make my multicolor glass text, I decided now would be a good time to freshen up my tutorial writing skills. This particular style of text is quite similar to the other shiny effects I’ve used in a couple of tutorials, except I play with a lot of contrasting alterations to create the multiple hues and vibrant colors the text usually has. This isn’t actually very difficult, but it requires a lot of experimentation to find a combo that works with your image.

You see, the entire concept relies on using a single image to create all your multiple hues, so depending on the color/lighting attributes of your image, the settings I use may completely backfire for you. Now now… no need to worry! I’ll walk you through each painful step, and let you know when it’s time to break free of the mold and try different settings to get the right effect. After all, you’re not a lemming are you?

So, here is the effect we’re going to create:

Now don’t let the length of this tutorial fool you… I just like turning simple things into novels. Once you learn this technique and don’t need to read through each step, you should be able to do this in about 5 minutes.

FINAL NOTE: I am assuming you have some basic experience in Corel Photopaint and I do not have to explain some of the simple principals such as what the “Object Docker” is and such… if you’re not sure on some steps, please review some of my older tutorials that cover these basic tools and tricks.

Shall we dance?

Part 1 – Creating the Text Overlay!

First thing we need to do is create our pattern for the text overlay. Basically we’re going to make a blurry colorful object, then slice it into the desired text.

Step 1: Fire up Corel Photopaint and create your new document. For our text, I’ll be using the following settings:

Step 2: Pick an image that you like and paste it all over the place… feel free to just use parts of the image, flip it around, invert it etc… just play around and drop stuff randomly. You can also use various images, so it’s really up to you at this point. I decided to just grab my sig from the P2L forums and dump that around a few times in various positions.

Step 3: Once you’ve got everything pasted the way you like it, select all the objects in your Object Docker and combine them to a single object layer.

You should now only have 2 object layers… the background and the object with your image(s) pasted in various positions.

Step 4: Time to distort our text and mess around a bit. I encourage you to try using all kinds of distortion effects and not just follow what I do. You can get all kinds of great results just by trying a few random filters you’ve never played with before! I’ll start off by using the Ripple Effect.

I used the following Ripple settings:

Step 5: Once you’ve distorted the images to your satisfaction (I’m easily pleased), you’ll need to blur it up to get the soft vibrant colors in the text. I’ll use a Gaussian Blur effect for this step.

My settings for Gaussian Blur:

And the final result (Ignore the gif formatting with the poor blending in these screenshots… when you’re working in the program, it should stay nice and smooth for you. I reduced the quality to keep this tutorial down in size):

Please continue to page 2.