Photoshop effects tutorial: How to make a chalkboard effect in Photoshop

Photoshop effects tutorial: How to make a chalkboard effect in Photoshop

I have been seeing insprational quotes and cute little designs done in chalk all over Pinterest and I have wondered how I could create one of these to share with my Pinterest followers. With a lot of trial and error in Photoshop I knew that I could create this effect in Photoshop  and finally it worked. Although I am an advanced Photoshop user you can learn how to create this create chalkboard Photoshop effect with some basic Photoshop knowledge, so don’t be intimidated.

So I am going to start off by opening Photoshop and creating a new blank canvas with a width of 525 pixels and a height of 700 pixels. I then made a chalkboard background and I have included this background for you to download and use so you can start creating right away, your welcome for cutting out an extra step!

After you have your chalkboard ready you will need to type some text on your board. Then I am going to add an overlay over your text, a pattern overlay, you can do this quickly by going to your layers panel, and adding a paper overlay. If you don’t have a paper overlay, I will attach one to this post and you can download the paper, open in photoshop, and then click edit > define pattern > name and save the pattern. Then when you go over to your pattern overlay you will see the new paper overlay show up in your pattern library.

So you can see we are starting to get somewhere with this and it beginning to look like chalk art! Our next step is to add a few more effects to our text, the first thing we are going to do is rasterize our text layer so that we can manipulate the text anyway we want. Do this by right clicking on your text layer, find rasterize text and click, you will see your text box change and know that you have completed this step. Then we are going to go to filter > noise > add noise and set our noise around 35%, you can choose what you think is best for your text.

Now we are going to use a brush to make this effect look a little more realistic. Go over to your panel and click on eraser and choose an eraser brush that looks like a round speckled brush, like little tiny dots in a circle. You will need to turn down the opacity on your eraser to around 10%, but play around with it and see what you like best. Here is what we have so far:

Next, I am going to add a little more chalkboard effect with a paintbrush to make this look a little more realistic. I am also going to add a little creative detail and add a little print and pattern to this piece and follow the same steps above when adding pattern. When you are ready take your paintbrush and keep the same dotted circle brush, almost like a stipling brush, turn the opacity down, I am using around 25% opacity, but once again you can play around with what you like best. Gently swipe your paint brush over the canvas until you are happy. Switching back and forth between the eraser and paintbrush, adding and taking away as much as you like.

And that’s it, is really is that simple! I can’t wait to see what you create, you can pin to our Pinterest board or facebook us with your designs so we can see your creativity as well!