How to use Photoshop and Your Printer to Make Big Letters
If you ever need some large scale letters for a DIY craft or décor project, this tutorial is for you! I originally did this to make stencils/templates of letters to cut out of vinyl for some wall quotes which worked out wonderfully but really this could come in handy for anything you might need big letters for. I will be showing you an easy way to use Photoshop, your printer and some chip board to make some great letters/words for your projects. You can also adapt this to any shape you want as well. Using Photoshop is awesome because you can make your letter or image any size you need it. When working with letters you can use any font you have on your computer... not to mention you have your pick of the bagillions of free fonts you can download all over the internet. Photoshop is such an awesome program and I don't think I will ever get tired of using it. Let's get started!!
What You Will Need
- Photoshop
- Printer
- Printer Paper
- Spray Adhesive
- Scissors
- Chip board (cut up cereal boxes and frozen pizza boxes work just as well)
Step One
Open up Photoshop. I use Photoshop CS4 but you should be able to adapt these instructions to any version you have. Once you have Photoshop open click on file>>>new and then click on the preset drop down box and click on U.S. Paper then OK. You should now have a document ready to go.
First thing is figuring out what font and what size you want your letters to be.. Once you have decided click on the T (text) icon in the panel on the left side of the page.. depending on what size you want your letter to be make a text box covering about the amount of page you want your letter to be and type the letter.. When you are typing large scale letters you have to manually go in and type your text size (by default the drop down box only goes only to 72 pt) so highlight your letter, go in the text size box and type 200 and your letter should be larger now. You can increase or decrease this number until you get your letter the size and font that you want. Just remember you'll have to type the number in the font size box to change it.
Play with different fonts and sizes until you get it the size you want it. Once you get the letter size and font you want, now you can type and print them out. Depending on how big they are you may be able to fit a few letters together on one page or you may only have enough room for one letter on one page. Keep track of the letters/words you need so you can be sure to get them all typed in and printed out.
Step Two
Once your letters are printed, spray the back side of the printed page with some spray adhesive and glue each one of them to chip board. Once glued on the chip board just cut the printed letters out and when you are finished peel the printed letter that you used as a template off and you'll have some awesome, large chipboard letters/words for your garland, banner or whatever you need them for!
Note:
I am no expert at Photoshop, however this project is very easy to do in Photoshop. If you have another program that you like to use, you should give it a try. I'm sure this can be done in other programs as long as you can resize your text to be as big as you need it to be.
