Have a wooden fence in the back garden covered in hedging. Cleared most of it but left a little behind and used my secateurs to carve a name out of it -
Kathy's Garden.
Then I got my branding iron and burnt more text into the fence underneath the topiary -
Hampshire Happiness.
Here's the result -
Actually, NOT...
Just having a bit of gardening fun with Photoshop.
I started with an image of a panelled fence, then one of some foliage. These were placed on their own Layers. Then I created a Text Layer for the
Kathy's Garden foliage effect and adding a Layer Mask and some Refine Mask techniques, Drop Shadow and Inner Glow effects I got the image of the hedge to form into the text shape.
I added a second Text Layer for
Hampshire Happiness and using several different effects I got the 'etched out' effect.
The final result was achieved with
Photoshop CS5, so if you wanted this exact effect you would need
CS5 or above. I haven't included the full Tutorial here for that reason, but if you have CS5 or better and want to try it I can post a link to the steps involved.
You could probably get something similar with other programs such as
Photoshop Elements or
Paintshop Pro, but you would need to experiment.
It gives a realistic result, so at times when you can't do any gardening then it's just a bit of fun, and you can impress your friends with your 'topiary' and other gardening skills
