Design an Abstract Colourful, Artistic Feeling Text Effect in Photoshop

In this tutorial, I will show the processes I took to create this Abstract Colourful, Artistic Feeling Text Effect in Photoshop. The steps are really simple but I think the end result looks good :) Have a try!

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

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Ok let’s get started!

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

Font

Step 1

Create a new document sized 1200px * 800px, fill the background layer with black, use the font we downloaded and type some texts on the canvas:

On the text layer, apply the follow layer blending options:

Drop Shadow

Inner Shadow

Bevel and Emboss

Gradient Overlay

Stroke

and you will have the following effect:

Step 2

Now we’re into the interesting part of this tutorial. Create a new layer on top of the text layer and name it as “lines outside”, grab a 1px solid brush as shown below:

Use this brush to paint on the edge of every letter on the canvas:

Make sure you paint around the edges:

and this is the overall effect:

Step 3

Now we can add a bit lighting variations to the text. One quick way to do this is to load the selection of the “lines” layer with created in previous step, apply the following Refine Edge options:

Maintain the selection, create a new layer called “refined edge” on top of the “lines” layer, fill the selection with Black color on this new layer:

As you can, we added some dark color to the text. However because of the refined edge option used, the dark colour is not covering the whole text.

Optionally, you can change the blending mode of this refined edge layer to be “Color Burn” – this will reveal the edge lines better than the “Normal” blending mode.

We can also add some blurring effect to the text. To do this, duplicte the “lines” layer once and name the duplicated layer as “motion blur”, put this layer above the original text layer.

Apply the following Motion Blur filter settings to it:

Resize the motion blur layer to roughly the same size of the text layer, and you will have the following effect:

Step 4

Create a new layer on top of all previous layers called “cloud overlay”, and on this new layer, use the Lasso Tool with a 40px feather to draw a selection around the text:

Render some cloud inside the selection (with white foreground colour and black background colour):

change the blending mode of this cloud layer to “Hard Light”, and you will have the following effect:

Step 5

Now let’s add some colours to the text. Create a new layer called “Colours”, load the selection of the text layer, and grab a soft brush with colours of your choice, paint some colours inside the selection:

Duplicate this colours layer twice, change the layer blending mode according to the below:

and you will have the following effect:

Add the following two adjustment layers on top of the colours layer:

Color Balance

Vibrance

and you will have the following effect:

Create a new layer called “abstract texture” just above the background layer, grab any abstract brushsets you like (you can find lots of them on qbrushes.net or brusheezy) and paint on it. You can adjust the colour of the brush as you paint for some colour variations:

Step 6

We’re almost done! There is one more trick I would like to show you – the Wave Filter. I personally like it very much and sometimes it generates some very unique style for your design.

So flatten the image, duplicate the background layer once and go to Filter > Distort > Wave: