I was working on a project recently where I wanted to create headers referencing four different types of metal. I’ll start with the finished images and then I’ll discuss how they were created.

First, I needed to know what color represented each kind of metal. A quick Google search gave them to me: Bronze (#cd7f32), Silver (#c0c0c0), Gold (#d4af37) and Platinum (#e5e4e2). Having just a solid color wasn’t metallic enough for me. So I used one of the textures from Textures Unleashed Volume 2: Metal to fill an area with brushed metal.

Once an area was filled with the brush metal texture, it was desaturated to remove all color. Another rectangle was filled with the each metal color and merged at 70% opacity with the underlying brushed metal. Now I had brushed bronze, silver, gold and platinum.

The last step was to add the text. Each word was converted from an object (layer) to a mask (selection) so I could use the shape of the text to apply an effect in Corel PHOTO-PAINT (or Adobe Photoshop). The last step was accomplished with the Bevel filter in Alien Skin’s Eye Candy 7. It didn’t take long and I love the resulting headers!