The chalkboard style has been very trendy for a while now. We’ve been seeing it on invitations to wall art, signs, etc. In this tutorial I will show you my method of designing a chalkboard wedding invitation.

Create a new document in Photoshop. You can use any size but I’m going to create an A5 invitation.

Go to File – Place and place a chalkboard texture in your document. Click below to download my free chalkboard background.

Type out the request wording. I’m using the Mathlete font at 30pt. You can use fonts that already have a chalkboard look to them, but in this tutorial I will show you how to turn any font into a chalkboard font.

Now we are going to warp the text. To do that, select the text with the text tool and in the toolbar at the top, click on the warp text button.

Choose the arc style and choose a bend of about 18%.

Type out the bride and groom’s names. Remember, the bride’s name always comes first. Here I used Oleo Script Swash in 80pt. For the “and” I used a dingbat font called Bergamot Ornaments. You can find the “and” by typing a “y”.

Now type out the date and time. I used the Mathlete font in 48pt for the date, and the Oleo font in 26pt for the time.

The wedding venue, ceremony and reception can be placed below this. I used Mathlete in 30pt and Oleo in 24pt.

Now that all of our text is laid out we can give it a chalkboard look. Double-slick on a text layer in the layers palette to bring up the layer style window. Apply a 1pt white stroke. Change the blend mode to Dissolve, and turn down the opacity to around 80% or whatever looks good to you.

For the larger text you can apply a stroke of 2pt instead of 1pt.

We are almost done; we only need a frame. Pick the rectangle shape tool (U) and draw a frame around the text. Remove the fill from this shape by going to the layers palette and changing the fill from 100% to 0%. It now has no fill and no stroke. Now just apply a stroke like you did with the text, but give it a stroke of about 9pt.

Using the Bergamot Ornaments dingbat font again, choose a dingbat that you would like to place in the corners. Here is the dingbat I chose and also the final invitation. Add some more ornaments to decorate your invitation.

The cool thing about the chalkboard look is that it does not have to be perfect to be pretty. In fact, it’s all about mixing interesting (and sometimes lots of) fonts and adding decorations.