Happy 10! Project: Misty Turns 10! Part 2

Misty's birthday week continues...today I worked on one of the photos taken on her birthday. Chalkboard art is all the rage right now and it's everywhere!  Inspired by various pins on Pinterest, I knew the exact look I wanted, but I did not have a chance to prepare a chalkboard, so I had to cheat improvise and rely on a bit of Photoshop magic.  I am in no way anywhere near being a Photoshop guru, but I can get the job done...most of the time, and if I get stuck, there's usually a ton of resources and tutorials out there to help me out.  So, this is kind of what I had in mind, found on Pinterest:

The link to the original source for the photo appears to be broken, so unfortunately I cannot give a proper credit for the picture.  Anyways, you see a lot of these similar kids' birthday photos out there, but I can't say I've seen one done with a dog...until now!  The photo I chose for this mini project was this one:

All I had to do was isolate out the white background and replace it with a chalkboard texture.  I used this one by Karin Dalziel on Flickr.  I won't go into details about how to isolate an object in Photoshop since there are gazillion tutorials out there on the topic already. Generally, it's easier to isolate your subject from a less busy background, like a solid color in my case. This is how my photo looked at this stage:

Now that I have a blank chalkboard canvas, the rest is all about personalization!  You'll need a few fonts and dingbats to give it that chalk feel and to embellish your art. I think it looks better when you mix a lot of different fonts and things look a bit more random and messy like a real chalkboard.  Go crazy and decorate to your heart's content!  These are some of the fonts I used: 

1. Aria Penci Roman  2. Pencil Pete  3. Eraser  4. Chalk Hand Lettering Shaded  5. KG Flavor and Frames

It actually took me a while to finish this last part, because I was trying to figure out the layout and the wording on the fly.  I think a little planning on paper beforehand would've made things go much quicker...oh well, that's what I get for being lazy!  Here's the finished photo:

So, would I recommend this method to people?  Hmm....I'm not sure.  It's certainly less time consuming and simpler to just use a real chalkboard for your backdrop.  It's also much more organic to use real handwriting than computer fonts and also you can decorate it any way you want.  However, I think the photoshop-generated chalkboard does allow you the flexibility to edit your writing later if you need to, and not everyone is artistic or has nice enough of handwriting...and I think it looks "realistic" enough.  So, I think it really depends on your individual project needs.