Where a while ago id took my time and made a tutorial, however i came cross something today that id share with the rest of the world while having trouble to get my hands on a word written in japanese or chinese kanji. I where making a layout for a akupunkture/massage dude who practised ancient medicine in China a couple of years and I wanted to have the chinese word for health in chinese kanji letters imbedded into the design. It would be easy to put a random kanji in there and hope somone would notice but id like to get the authentic stuff. However case is finding a big enough image or vector based kanji image of the correct word where.. yeah impossible not to mention possibly copyright infragnant. However i did some research and found a great resource and came up with a method for making correct letters at the size i needed from small ones wound at the website bellow.
Tutorial start:
I found this website http://zhongwen.com/ witch is a english to chinese dictionary what gives you the correct kanji/s for a word. and gives you this kind of image
which we will borrow as a template for the letter we will make. So copy the image and paste it into your photoshop workspace on a new layer.
Mark out the little small Kanji with your standard rectangular marque tool and press Ctrl-shift-i to invert the selection, then delete the rest as we dont need it.
Press Ctrl-t to bring up your free transformation box and resize the letter to the size you want it, however not to small because we will be doing some brushwork in the next few steps and to small is bad for that, you can always size it down later.
And you are done! Nah Just kidding the letter looks like rubbish and cant be used in its current state.
Go to the channles tab and select the blue channel by ctrl clicking on it.
Invert the selection by pressing Ctrl-Shift-i.
Pick out the rectanguar marque tool and deselect everything thats not the letter ot the white thats still around it by holding down alt-shift as you use the marque tool.
In the channels tab use the "save selection as channel" button. This will make the selection into a channel we will draw in. Deselect using ctrl-d.
A tablet is always nice fore these kinds of things but a mouse works fine. Take out a chaligrafic somewhat textured brush like a default chark brush and make its size so that it s just about the same average size as the kanji. Zoom in on it to a comfotable size amd set the opacity to 100% and color #ffffff white. Then trace within the kanji making the long lines first and then the smaller ones, not forgeting about the smallest outdents. it doesnt have to be 100% spot on the lines if it gets crowded and lines start blending together.
Now we have a very bold letter so pull up your levels slider and shove the left slider pin to the right one!
The edges are somewhat grungey. I like it that way but if you dont then pull the level slider back alittle to soften them out or you can also use the filter<noice<average filter to round of edges. Then make a selection of the channel by ctrl-clicking on it.
Go back to your layers and fill the selection on a new layer with the colour of your choise.
All done now.
