A designer came to me a few days ago and asked where to get a “camouflage font”. I scratched my head a bit and couldn’t think of any fonts by that name. I replied by suggesting the font Stencil was often used when a military theme was involved. When I heard back from the designer, they suggested they wanted a font with a camouflage pattern.

Aha! The lightbulb is now on. Fonts by definition are a vector shape and can only have a solid fill. Now that doesn’t mean you can’t create the text in your favorite graphics software and use a camouflage fill. So now our original question has gone from a camouflage font to a camouflage fill.

Look at the two samples I’ve created above. Both started out with the Stencil font filled with black. Then I filled each one with a bitmap texture from the Textures Unleashed Volume 8 collection. The top sample uses the Camouflage Cloth and the bottom uses the Camouflage Netting. I used Corel PHOTO-PAINT (see a video tutorial), but this same fill can be used in most any graphics software. Yes, it is just as easy in CorelDRAW, Illustrator, Photoshop and more!

To make each sample pop, I used the Bevel filter in Alien Skin’s Eye Candy. Corel PHOTO-PAINT users can try The Boss filter to get similar results. Lastly I added a subtle drop shadow on each sample. In total, it took me less than five minutes to create both of the samples shown. When you have a bunch of really cool bitmap patterns like those in our Textures Unleashed collection, it isn’t hard to create cool stuff really quickly.