In today’s Photoshop CS5 tutorial I’m going to show you how to create one very good looking horror text effect. This is what we gonna make:

Lets create our new canvas. I’m using one 600 x 360 px. Now lets make our background. Create a new empty layer and name it “background”. Select the gradient fill tool from the main toolbox and select the following settings for the fill:

Apply the gradient fill from top to bottom of the canvas. Now open the background’s layer options and select the Pattern Overlay with the following options:

The pattern is from the Photoshop’s Rock Patterns pack.

Now we must have our background looking like this:

Now it’s time to create our text for the horror text effect.

In this Photoshop tutorial I am using one font called Cartographer created by Scott Ford Aneloski. You can download it from here.

You can type whatever word you want but in this tut I’m going with the word “horror”. With this font it’s a nice effect to have your first and last letters capitalized as I did.

Let’s create a new layer and name it “tentacles”. Now with the Pen tool draw some random paths from the letters edges and with Round Point Stiff brush with size about 8 – 10 px, select the Path Selection Tool  right click on the path and select “Stroke Path”. Be sure that Simulate Pressure box is selected. Your result will be something like this:

Now let’s select both “tentacles” and the text layers and merge them together. We can do this by holding the Ctrl key while cliking on the layers in the Layer’s panel and then right click on them and select “Merge Layers”.

With the new layer selected now it’s the time to add our horror text effect by applying some layer effects.

Let’s start with the Drop Shadow Effect.

Now add the Inner Shadow effect.

Now it’s time to give our text some depth by applying the Bevel and Emboss effect.

These are the settings for the Bevel and Emboss Contour:

…and the settings for Bevel and Emboss Texture:

The name of the pattern is “Strings” from the “Artistic Surfaces”. This pattern will give our text the look of something like veins running trough the letters. If you want to try the effect with other custom patterns you can check this tutorial How to Create Custom Pattern in Photoshop.

Now we will add a Color Overlay Effect.

The last Layer Effect is the Pattern Overlay with these settings:

The pattern name is “Berber”.

Now our Horror Text Effect will look something like this:

This effect looks very cool not only with texts but also on shapes and every other painted form in Photoshop. Try it with different fonts and compositions to achieve your own unique look. It can be well blended with some blood brushes from my 34 Sets of Photoshop Blood Splatter Brushes collection.

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