How to make a text cursor

This tutorial is teach you how to make your own text cursor for your tumblr.

(It varies between the four, depending on which stage you decide to stop at.)

Note: Sorry that it doesn’t look that nice, I chose a bad font D:, if you follow the same steps, your results would probably look way better than mine!)

WHAT YOU REQUIRE:

• Photoshop or Gimp

GIMP has many of the same tools as Photoshop and is free with no trials or charge.

To download GIMP click here!

If you want Photoshop then I’m afraid I can’t supply you with the link I used since the blog deactivated but I suggest you just GOOGLE it.

Technically you can even use Paint for some aspects of the tutorial, but I recommend using Photoshop/GIMP as it’ll be easier to follow, but you may do as you please ^.^!

For this tutorial I am using ‘Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended Edition’, but I reckon that the features are roughly the same in most versions.

STEP ONE:

Open your chosen software and create a new document/canvas depending on how big you want your text for your cursor.

I recommend a size of anything to 100px, due to anything higher not load on tumblr. So I recommend a width of anything to 100px. 100px being the maximum.

I’m going to use the image size of 50px by 15px.

STEP TWO:

Zoom in! (I zoomed in to about 1600% but this can vary)

STEP THREE:

Unlock the background layer, UNLESS you started with a layer 1 automatically then you can skip this step, and go to step four.

Just double click the blank space next the the word ‘Background’ then a popup…should…popup, just click okay and your previous locked background layer should now be an unlocked ‘Layer 0/1’.

STEP FOUR:

Select the ‘text tool’.

Once you select the text tool, select the colour you want to use for your cursor. 

Once you’ve selected the text tool and the colour of your choice (I’m choosing black so it’ll be easier to see in this tutorial), click on the canvas and type what ever you want it to say - if the text is too big, no worries simply change the font size.

If you want to add a pointer to your cursor, make sure to put your text towards the end of the canvas so that you can have enough room to make a pointer like so:

If it doesn’t allow you to do anything and a popup comes up asking you to ‘rasterize’ the layer, just click ok.

STEP FIVE:

Skip to Step Six, if you do not want to outline your cursor text.

So now you got your text ready, find a Fx button under ‘Layers’.

Click on the Fx button and a menu will pop up, select ‘Stroke’.

Play around with the settings and when you’re satisfied click ‘OK’!]

I chose the colour blue for this tutorial so that it’ll be visible, but usually I would have done a white outline.

Here are my settings:

As a result, I achieved this: 

STEP SIX:

Switch from whatever tool you were using previously to the pencil tool.

Make sure that the pencil is set to a size of 1px (pixel).

The reason that you need a pencil is because it is easier to make sure that it is more accurate as you can then just make the larger square one smaller square at a time. So instead of thinking it as 1 pixel, you can think of it as 1 square ^^.

So, with that said, make a square in the top left corner. Make four mini squares (1px) making a larger square (4px).

Then add another four ‘squares’ (pixels).

…and another four ‘squares’ (pixels).

You can stop here or you can carry on to get a larger cursor.

So now, just add another four ‘squares’ (pixels).

…and again!

You can also stop here or you carry on to make your cursor like this:

By doing this:

Now here are the three results, zoomed out, that you would have achieved (it varies between the three because you may have stopped at different stages).

I thought that the cursor didn’t look too smooth of a triangle so I added more pixels, if you want to do the same here’s a screenshot of the pixels of the cursor.

Here is the final results:

STEP SEVEN:

Save your cursor as a ‘PNG file’.

…and that’s it! You’re done ^^!

Ask me if you need help with anything extra!..but if you go anon then be SPECIFIC! ◕‿◕ 

Here is a link to my other cursor related tutorials which include how to add it to your tumblr and how to make two different cursors.

Here is another link to a collection of cursors in case you give up and just decide to use one made by others.