Cow Patterned Text Effect

1/ Open a transparent, 300x300 canvas.

 

2/ Make sure the foreground/background colors are black and white. If not press Shift-D.

 

3/ Apply the Clouds filter (Filter > Render > Clouds).

 

 

4/ To make the darks, darker and stand out more apply the Difference Cloud filter ontop of the Clouds filter a couple times. I did it 6 times. To apply the Difference Clouds filter go to Filter > Render > Difference Clouds. To repeat this filter just press Ctrl-F after you've first applied the filter manually.

 

 

5/ Now apply the Gaussian Blur filter (Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur...) and set the radius to around 8 pixels.

 

 

6/ Now go to Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast. This brings up a little pop-up with two sliders for brightness and contrast. Slide the Brightness one to about 20 and the Contrast one all the way up to 100.

 

 

7/ To make this pattern seam less we will need to apply the Offset Filter (Filter > Other > Offset...). To determine the amount of offset we want, we divide the width and height of the canvas by two. In this case our canvas of 300x300 needs an offset of 150 horizontal and 150 vertical.

 

 

8/ I kept the pattern large when making it for ease of creation however, unless your text is going to be massive, we need to scale it down. Go to Image > Image Size... Change the width to 20%. The height will automatically keep scale with the width.

 

 

9/ Now we can finally define this as a pattern: Edit > Define Pattern... Give the pattern a name and press OK. It has now been saved as a pattern and will be used later.

 

Now we will be looking at applying the pattern to the text.

 

10/ Open up a new, transparent canvas with whatever dimensions that will fit the scale of you text. I opened up a 500x200 sized canvas.

 

11/ Use the Horizontal Text Type tool, create a new text layer and type whatever letters you want.

The color doesn't matter but to make it clear I'll use black. The font is also totally up to you but to make the pattern more clear, use a bold and wide font. I'm using Deja Vu Sans, the weight is Condensed Bold and the size is 80pt. 

 

 

12/ Select all the transparent areas (those that are not occupied by text). Make sure to select areas enclosed by letters such as A or D. 

 

13/ Inverse this selection (Ctrl-Shift-I) so you are selecting your text.

 

14/ Select the Rectangular Marquee Tool in the toolbox, create a new layer (Ctrl-Shift-N) and then right-click on the selection you made in the previous step and then choose Fill...

 

15/ Use: Pattern and in the Custom Pattern selection box, choose your cow pattern, make sure the opacity is set at 100% and click OK. 

 

16/ The cow pattern is in the text, however, it is very hard to read. To combat this choose a bright blue color (I used #1289F8). Right click on the new layer you've filled with the cow pattern in the Layers Window and select Blending Options...

 

17/ In the Blending Options Window, under Styles select Outer Glow. Move the Opacity up to 100%, change the color to the blue (#1289F8) and set the Spread to 20% and press OK.

 

And voila! There you go. If the pattern didn't turn out quite like a cow, that's OK. You should go back to step 3 and play around with the Clouds and Difference Clouds filter until you get a suitably authentic one or the size of the pattern. You can also argue below whether or not the pattern is a cow or dalmatian.