Ghostly Letters in Illustrator & Draw by Brian Fuelleman


‘Tis the season. Here’s a way to add a ghostly or smokey style of let- tering effect within Illustrator or Draw. This effect lets you add a ghostly look to your lettering, or put in a watermark over your images, illustrations or photo- graphs without completely losing the view of the image that lies behind. You can change or tweak the opac- ity of your text without having to go into Photoshop or some paint program to do it. You can save off multiple versions to compare them or even combine them for more variety. While I’ve done the effect here using straight white let- tering on a dark background, the reality is you could do this using colors to get a smoke or maybe fire look on a light colored background. This only takes a few minutes to learn, but you could experiment for hours or even days with the possible variations. 1 - I’m using a fairly bulky style of lettering for this; I don’t want the lettering to get lost in the background texture


or effect. I’ve typed out the words “Ghostly Text” at a pretty substantial size (72pt/1”), and then I converted the text to outlines, made a compound path out of it, and copied it. 2 - Dropping the opacity In Illustrator you can change the opacity of an object, or even a whole layer. Like shooting candy colors or transparent paints, this lets you create an image or texture without obscuring the background completely. 3 - Creating Highlights I’ve dropped the opacity down a bit so that I have an idea on how large the highlight will be. To get my highlights I’m going to drag a copy of my text straight up by a small space. Because I dropped the opacity down I can see the difference in shade where the two lines of text don’t overlap. Once I’m hap- py with how big that “highlight” is, I move the copy of the text (the top one I just moved) back behind the original line of text. In Illustrator I can do this by either going to my Object menu and pull down to Arrange - Send


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