Hole Punch and Tie Knots Photoshop Tutorial

When I first posted this part from my old design site, I got designers asking how I made the knots and hole punches look so realistic. Now you can follow step by step and learn yourself.

Hole punch and tie photoshop tutorial

Step1 – Start with some notebook paper. Take a picture of it on your desk, grab one from the interwebs or go to a texture site and borrow one from them. While this tutorial looks cool, you will find out how easy it is to make. :)

Step2 – Use a basic brush size of 19. In this image I used background color of #362F23 (also the hole punch color). The string is #F6E05C color and the orange is #CF8329.

Step3 – Grab a paintbrush size of 3-4 with color of #F6E05C to draw the strings. You can hold down SHIFT and draw a straight line. Notice how I made one line (tie) a little off center. Can’t have them all perfectly straight. Looks uneven. lol

Step4 – Making the knots. These knots are a series of small uneven lines. Yea, it’s that easy. Making small lines of many different sizes and occasionally laying a line going horizontal (left to right). Look closely to what I did in the zoom in view to get a real understanding of it.

Step5 – On the bottom left hole punch, I added another hole. No matter how steady you hand you usually miss place a hole punch in real life, so why not in your design world too. Throw in a bent corner (bottom right) and you got a nice looking project. Making the bend was easy too. I clipped the corner off, flipped it over, and then used the warp tool to give it that curled up shape. Expect to see it in another tutorial in greater detail, in the future.

Step6 – To finish it off, add some fun, little shapes. Adding a bit of grunge and some ripped edges will also increase the complexity and realism of your image. Use your favorite font to place your text over the top in a new layer and you got yourself a sweet looking image. Have fun with it.