Adding Some Festive Embellishments

Decorative orange pattern added to finished lettering.

Before proceeding, 'Select None'.

If you want to embellish your letters with the orange triangles used in the image above, create a new vector layer at top of all others.

Using Preset Shapes, draw a small triangle on new layer. Use orange (#4 on swatch) for fill color (no stroke color).

From Tools, select 'Preset Shape'. On Tool Options palette, select 'Triangle' from drop down list of shapes. Un-check 'Retain style'. Check 'Create as Vector' and 'Anti-alias'. Line style is solid.

With the Pick tool, select the triangle, right click and 'Copy'. Right click again, and do 'Paste New Vector Selection' twice. Zoom in. Line up the 3 triangles in a row with base points touching.

Select all 3 triangles, right click, select 'Group'.

From Image menu, select 'Free Rotate'. Direction: Right, Degrees: 90 and un-check 'All layers'. Use the points on the bounding box to resize the group of triangles so they will fit inside your letters (refer to above image). Zoom in as needed and place triangles over one of the letters to gauge size. Once the size is OK, right click and 'Copy'. Right click to 'Paste New Vector Selection' off to one side to save as an unchanged 'original'. You can also use Ctrl C to copy and Ctrl G to paste vector selection.

Now paste (Ctrl G) a copy of the triangle group on the left side of each and every letter. If you need to start over and copy/paste triangles again, remember you have the 'spare' copy sitting off to one side.

Some of the letters will not have a perfectly vertical 'leg' and the triangles won't fit well without a little rotating. Go back thru your message and select each triangle group with Pick tool, as needed, to align/rotate until it fits in left 'leg' of letter. See example shown here. For round letters (C and O), right click the triangles and select 'Un-Group'. Now you can rotate each triangle separately to fit the curve.

For the words, font and arrangement I am using, a problem occurs where some of the letters overlap. Portions of the orange triangles land on top of the green outline. This may or may not happen with other fonts and messages. Because PSP won't let us fit the triangle embellishment between our letter shapes (as currently designed), the workaround is to cover up or erase the problem. You could use the Pen tool to draw green vector covering the triangles that should be hidden by overlapping letter or, simply erase those triangles after converting to raster (in the next step).