Text on a path in PS – part 1 (filling the path with text)

Hi! Kate here with my very first post on Penny’s blog! Have you ever seen a shape filled with text and wondered how to do it yourself? Well wonder no more, today I’m going to show you how it’s done! This tutorial is really for Photoshop users. If you use PSE you can use pre-made text paths, although you can’t create them on your own.

Both of my boys play soccer and I absolutely fell in love with Penny’s new soccer kit, Goal!

If you take a look at the preview, you’ll see that she included a customizable soccer jersey. I took one look at it and thought that it would be really neat to use it as a journaling block. But how would I get the text to fill the shape? It’s easier than you might think.

First, I opened up one of the jerseys in photoshop and <ctrl>-clicked on the thumbnail in the layers pallette to select the shape (marching ants around outline).

Since I don’t want my text going all the way to the edge of the shape, I’m going to make the selection a bit smaller by clicking select>modify>contract

then typing 20 in the next box to contract it by 20 pixels. This is what it should look like now…

Now click on the paths palette tab and click the ‘make path from selection’ button. You’ll then have a work path in the shape of your selection.

Finally, click back on the layers palette and make a new layer. Select the text tool, click anywhere in the shape and start typing. Your text will fill the shape you just made.

If you’re using PSE, you can’t make the text path to fill, but you can use one that was made in Photoshop. If you use PSE, or if you would rather just use pre-made text paths, you can check out Penny’s awesome pre-made text paths found in her store under ‘tools‘. This is just one example, she has several sets available.

I’d love to hear what you think about this tutorial and what tutorials you’d like to see in the future. Leave a comment here and let me know what you think! If you used the tutorial to make a text box for one of your layouts, I’d love to see the layout – link it up in the comments here!

Until next time… happy scrapping!