Adding Color to negative/missing portions of text

[AdamBurnett]

Hello - looking for suggestions on how to add color to the negated/missing (not sure if thats the right way to describe it) part of a font.  I've looked high and low and cant find anything relevant online.  

So, looking at the attached image, all I want to do is to fill the slashes that are dissecting the text with red but no matter what I do, I either end up filling ALL the text with red, or the entire background as well.

Any suggestions?  And sorry, I'm a total noob at this - any help is super appreciated!

 

Adam

 

 

 

 

[Old Bruce]

You would need a Solid copy of the font in the example. 

[Alfred]

The font in question is ‘Insomnia’ but I don’t think it includes solid versions of the glyphs. It would probably be easier to type some letters using a suitable extra-bold or black font and then clip some streaky coloured shapes to the letters.

[v_kyr]

That font looks similar in shape to some of the "headline" fonts, which don't have slashes.

[kaffeeundsalz]

2 hours ago, Alfred said:

It would probably be easier to type some letters using a suitable extra-bold or black font and then clip some streaky coloured shapes to the letters.

Maybe so, but since the letters are pretty geometrical, it's also not that hard to trace them with the pen tool to fill the gaps. Snapping helps a lot in this case. I know my version is not perfect, but it's just supposed to be a quick example. The hardest part was the letter G because there were so many key points missing and I don't think I got this one right. Anyway, it should be doable.

 

[carl123]

Duplicate the text layer
Change the duplicated layer to Impact font (which is a close match for the Insomnia font)
Change colour to red and drag/resize font to cover the original font (line up first and last letters as best as possible)
Drag Red font below original text in Layers panel
Starting on the left tweak character spacing (kerning) on red font to match black font 

May need additional tweaking depending on what characters are used in the final text but an interesting problem none the less

 

[Alfred]

9 hours ago, carl123 said:

Impact font (which is a close match for the Insomnia font)

That’s a good catch! They do look (suspiciously) similar, which means you don’t need to duplicate and line up anything: you can just type in Impact and clip shapes to it as described earlier.

By the way, Impact is included for free with Windows but (as far as I’m aware) not with macOS, so Mac users don’t have the same options here.

Edited January 8, 2022 by Alfred
Recent versions of macOS include Impact

[R C-R]

6 hours ago, Alfred said:

By the way, Impact is included for free with Windows but (as far as I’m aware) not with macOS, so Mac users don’t have the same options here.

FWIW, on my Mac running Catalina, in /System/Library/Fonts/Supplemental/ I have "Version 5.00x" of Impact regular, which includes 666 glyphs. According to https://support.apple.com/en-il/HT210192 it is included with this version of the macOS.

It works fine in the Affinity apps.

[Alfred]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

According to https://support.apple.com/en-il/HT210192 it is included

I presume this doesn’t only apply to Israel!

[R C-R]

5 minutes ago, Alfred said:

I presume this doesn’t only apply to Israel!

LOL! No, it was just the first Apple support article that came up when I used Google to search for fonts installed with Catalina. I don't know why it showed me that link instead of https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210192, but there was something about that il result being a 'beta' when I clicked on a 3 vertical dot icon next to the link, part of which said, "The result is in English· This result seems relevant for searches from many regions, including the United States."

So I guess Google may have been doing one of its (in)famous "A-B" tests.