In this first tutorial, we were shown how to create simple outlined text with a hard black shadow. Drop shadows are useful when you want to off-set text against a busy background because it gives the text some dimension.
This tutorial showed us how to rasterize text and merge layers, useful tools you actually find yourself using quite often. We chose text and created two layers of it, blended font colors, and added a filter to distort the effects of the color on the font. This is the finished product.
For this tutorial, we were asked to take a vector image and use one of the curves found within it to base our line of text on. I chose the curve of a smiley face's smile!
