Create a Shattered Text Effect with GIMP

• September 15, 2018
• Nick Saporito
• 9 comments

In today’s tutorial I’ll be demonstrating how you can use GIMP to create a shattered text effect where it appears as if the letters have been smashed to bits and scattered about.

The following is a brief outline of the steps taken to achieve this effect. For complete step-by-step instructions, please refer to the video tutorial at the end of the page.

Shattered Text Effect

The first thing we’re going to do is add some white text to a black background. The font I used is League Gothic, but feel free to use whatever font you’d like.

Next we’ll be applying a broken glass texture by overlaying it onto the text and setting the blend mode to Difference. The texture is as follows…

Click the image to download

Here’s how it looks once the texture is applied to the text…

Next we’ll use the Paths tool to create a selection around a segment of the text so that we can break everything into pieces that separate from each other.

Here’s how it will look once separated…

And here’s how it will look once we’ve repeated these steps throughout the rest of the text…

Now we just have to rotate each of the individual pieces so that it has a more natural, whimsical look that helps sell the illusion better. We’ll do this using the Rotate tool.

The final step is to add a background image and adjust the color curves a bit so that the background image and the text match each other seamlessly. Here’s the background image we’ll use…

Click the image to download

And with that, we are done! The final design is as follows…

Video Tutorial

For step-by-step instructions with voice narration, please watch the following video tutorial. If you have any questions leave a comment below. As always, thanks for watching!

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