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Metal Letter Charms |
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| Create a new image. File-> New, make the image large enough to accomadate your letter. Here, I've made it 250x250. |
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Create the letter. Set your foreground swatch to null. Click on the Gradient icon on the background swatch and click the swatch to bring up the Material dialog. Choose the Metal Steel gradient. Set the style to Linear, Angle to 45 and Repeats to 0. Click on the  text tool. Choose your font and make sure Create as is set to Vector. Click in the image and type in the letter you want. Click on the  Object Selector. Grab a corner node and right click drag to make the letter the size you want. |
See a screen capture of this step. |
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Make the eyelet holder. Click on the  Preset Shape tool. Swap the foreground and background swatches by clicking on the little two headed arrow next to the swatches. Choose the ellipse preset shape. Make sure that Anti-alias and Create as Vector are checked. Set the Width to about 10. Hold down the Shift key and right click drag out a little circle. Switch back to the Object Selector tool to size and move the circle into place. You will also need to grab the rotation handle and rotate it so that the gradient matches up with the letter. |
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Make a selection. In the layer control palette, click on the plus sign next to the vector layer to expand it. Shift click on each of the two vector sub-layers to select them. Selections-> From Vector Object. Click on the background layer, Layers-> New Raster Layer. Effects, 3D Effects-> Drop Shadow. Apply a thin, sharp black drop shadow. Here I've used Offsets of 1, Blur of 3, leave the Opacity at 100%. In the layer control palette, adjust the opacity of this layer to suit. Here, I've made it 70%. |
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Add a highlight. In the layer control palette, click on the top layer (the letter charm). Layers-> New Raster Layer. Effects-> 3D Effects-> Cutout. This also needs to be thin and sharp. Set the color to white, Offsets to 1, Blur to 3 and Opacity to 100%. |
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