How to Make Word Art Text - Paint Shop Pro Photo Tutorial

Creating your own word art text from scratch is easy. This is a quick tutorial to show you how to make word art text using Paint Shop Pro Photo. What we will focus on for this tutorial is making text that is straight across the top and curved on the bottom.

We're going to use a few tools and hopefully you are familiar with the basics of Paint Shop Pro Photo X2, this is the version I will be using. We will use the text tool, pen tool and the mesh warp tool.

To start create a new canvas for this tutorial make it:
Width = 800
Height 800
Pixels = 72
Transparent

Select the Pen Tool with the following settings:
Draw Point to Point = checked
Connect Segments = checked
Create on Vector = checked
Show Nodes = checked
Line Style = Straight
Width = 2.00
Anti-alias = checked
Fill = off (click the box with a circle that has a line through it, located under BG color in Materials.

Create a Curved Path to Use as a Guide
Now, click on the left side of the canvas about half way down, do not let go of the mouse button, while holding the left mouse button drag up and to the right to the top - center of your canvas and let go. Next, place the mouse across from your left point along the right edge of the canvas and click. You should see a curved line! Adjust your curve by left clicking on either node and dragging it to where you want it.

Create Your Text Above Your Curved Path
In the layer menu right click your BG layer (the bottom layer) and create a new vector layer. Then select your Text Tool and turn on the BG color by clicking the circle with a line in it located underneath the BG box in your Materials menu. Select the FG/Outline and BG/Fill colors for your text. We do not want our word art text to be connected to our curve so click right about the center of the curved path we created, a Text Entry box will pop up, type your text. (all caps works best) You should see your text going straight across the canvas just above the curved path/line.

Using the Mesh Warp Tool
Select your Mesh Warp Tool. You should see a lot of squares with points appear on your canvas. Each point controls your Mesh Horizontal lines and the Mesh Vertical lines. Set both the horizontal and vertical lines to 10 which creates ten lines across and ten lines from top to bottom. If you are confused you can watch the video for this tutorial and follow along. The link to the video is at the end of this tutorial.

We do not want any points inside of our text, however we do want points along the top of the text or above it and we need points below the text so we can warp it. You can adjust where your points are located by decreasing or increasing the Mesh Horizontal or Mesh Vertical settings. Or selecting and moving your text around.

Look at your canvas and focus on any points that are below the points closest to the bottom of your text but above the curved line we created. Let's move all the points between the bottom of our text and the curved line we created. As soon as you click on a point a box will pop up, you have to convert the text layer to a raster layer first so just click OK, and continue. To move excess points just left click on any point below the points along the bottom of your text and while holding the left mouse button drag down until the point is underneath the curved path.

When you have moved all the extra points between the bottom of your text and the curved line you can begin dragging each point at the bottom of the text and start warping/curving the lower part of your text. How? Just left click, hold the mouse button, and drag each point straight down until you reach the curved path and let go.

After you finish select any other tool, such as the Move Tool. Doing this will hide the Mesh Lines. Do you see just the text and the curved path? Great! Almost done, Go to your Layers, you should have a total of 3 layers. The bottom is your BG layer, the middle is your text, and the top layer is your path. Delete the top layer by right clicking on it, (before you can do anything a box pops up telling you to finalize your Mesh Warp affect, click OK) then continue by selecting delete to remove the path layer. The black curved line should disappear.

From this point you can add a BG color or texture and Merge the two layers and save your Word Art Text to a file. You can add effects to the text or do whatever you like. Did you have trouble following along with this tutorial? Yes. Then watch the video version of how to create Word Art Text to see each step, and follow along! Creating word art text with Paint Shop Pro Photo is not as complicated as it may seem.