Create Bone Claw Typography in Photoshop

In this Photoshop tutorial, I will show you the steps I took to create this Bone Claw Typography in Photoshop.

Inspiration of this tutorial came from this work here.

This is an intermediate level difficulty tutorial and some steps can be tricky.

Note: The Photoshop tutorial is done in Photoshop CC – therefore some screenshot may have slighting different layout as in the earlier version. Some brushes are exclusive to Photoshop CS6.

Here is a preview of the final effect I have for this tutorial: (click to enlarge)

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To complete this tutorial, you will need the following stocks:

Bone Stock Image by FantasyStock

Step 1

Create a new document sized 1200px*1200px with black background. Use a soft round white brush to paint background light in the centre: (set brush flow and opacity to be around 40% for a subtle light effect)

Use any font you like, type a letter onto our document – we will use it as a guide for the bone texture application later on:

Load the bone stock image into Photoshop, select the following area from the stock image:

Copy and paste it to our document, place it on the left side of the letter A:

Use a small eraser, tidy up and smooth the edge of the bone if your selection wasn’t perfect in the previous step:

Step 2

Apply the following the adjustment layers as clipping masks to the bone layer in the previous step:

Black and White

Levels

Curves

and here is the effect so far:

Step 3

We will go back the bone stock image and select another piece:

Copy and paste the selection to our document, place it to this following position:

Apply the following adjustment layers as clipping masks for this bone layer:

Black and White

Levels

and here is the effect so far:

Step 4

We will make some bone claws in this step. First we group the right bone layers made in Step 2 together, then right-click on the layer group and choose “Merge Group”:

Reduce the size of the bone to a small scale:

Duplicate this small bone layer a few times – then re-size, rotate each duplicated layer to form a claw shape:

Place the bone claw to the left side of the letter A:

Duplicate and add more bone claw to our texts, and cover the right side of the letter A as shown below:

Step 5

We can use a particle brush to paint some small particles around the text:

Turn off the original “A” text layer. Add a new layer below the text layer, paint or render some cloud, use the Warp Tool to warp the cloud as shown below:

This creates some motion in our text effect:

Step 6

We’re almost done! To finalise the effect, we can flatten the image and duplicate the background layer, apply the following Noise filter to the duplicated layer:

Add the following Selective Color adjustment layer on top to fine-tune the colour:

and here is my final effect: (click to enlarge)

That’s it for this tutorial! Hope you enjoy it and find it useful! If you have any questions about the steps, please contact me or leave a comment below. I will try my best to answer them.

Till next time, have a great day!