How To: Create a Weathered Handwritten Style Wallpaper

In this tutorial, I will show you how to create a withered old looking piece of faded paper with faded ink, complete with a banner of your name. The purpose of this tutorial is to show how one quick look at something can inspire you to get creative in your own style!

Final Image Preview

Materials needed: Text, Photoshop, Font: Jellyka – Estrya’s Handwriting, Paper (optional)

Difficulty: Easy

Completion time: 10, maybe 15 minutes? Depends on how much you like to tweak

OK, first off, let’s open a document, make it 2048X1200 (this is so you can use it on most bgs fit to size, or your Twitter account).

Click the thumbnail to enlarge and download the following texture. Or, if you prefer to use your own, I would suggest scanning (or creating) and using one that has faded edges, like this one.

Copy and paste it into your document. Rotate it 90 degrees (either direction, doesn’t matter) and scale it to fit the document size.

Next, download the Jellyka font here. (You can see where I got my inspiration   You can see they used unfocused lights as their bg and a more formal version of text that fits within the image borders)

Next thing we want to do is create a text layer above the paper layer. Paste in random scribbles if you’d like, or create something original. I used the text in the “About Me” section of my resume website.

Adjust the dimensions of the text box so the text bleeds over the edges. Set the blending mode to Overlay, and add a layer style of Color Overlay and use black with an opacity of 5%.

Here is where you will want to get creative with the text. Select all of your text in the box and open the Character Window and adjust accordingly. Below you can see the settings I used and what the results look like. I recommend using these, but feel free to use whatever you want. My font size was 229.

Next we are going to add a layer above the background text for our banner text. If you are satisfied with your image at this point, by all means, skip this step and move on to the finalizing steps.

Create some black text. I recommend using something significantly larger than the background text size. I used at least double the original size. I rasterized the layer so I could tweak and adjust the dimensions to my liking, however, this step isn’t totally necessary as you can go in almost any creative direction with the banner text.

In the layer style, you want to enable the following: Bevel and Emboss -> Contour, Pattern Overlay, and Stroke. For the pattern overlay, load the rock and stone patterns. Use the adjustments below. These settings do not have to be exact, but I recommend keeping it in the ballpark. (Contour remained unchanged)

Note the exclusion and overlay changes in the blend modes.

Your image should now look something along the lines of this:

Now for the finishing touches!

Next, we want to add a Gradient Map. (Can be found under Layer > New Adjustment Layer). I used a black and white gradient for mine, but feel free to use what you like. I would recommend sticking to a 2 color gradient, as a third color might make it look a little too unnatural. Set the blending mode to Multiply and this will conclude my input into this tutorial.

Feel free to add or change or tweak whatever you like to it. Also feel free to share your “creative changes” with me should you make any. I think this kind of image could produce several different types of variations that will be interesting to see.