Notepad Tutorial

This will teach how to create notepad paper in Photoshop. I used this technique for one of the site's layouts.

A .PSD file is available at the bottom of the page, and there's also a few extra steps teaching you how to make a ripped, grungey piece of paper.

1. Create a new document. Make it 886 pixels wide and 621 pixels high - this is about the size of an A4 sheet of paper resized for the web. (You might want to give a 50 pixel border around the 'paper' to make it easier to work with. It's also a good idea to use a dark background.) Select the document and fill with solid white.

2. Now that you have the white background to your paper, add some effects to the page. Click on the paper layer and select blending options. You can add a small drop shadow (of about 1px, with a distance of 2px) if you want, but I used a stroke - it works neater for layouts. So, select stroke from the blending options and choose a size of 1 px, position outside and opacity of around 20%.

3. To make the holes down the left side, take the elliptical marquee tool and whilst holding the shift key down, draw a circle a little bit down from the top of the page. Press delete. Hold shift down and use the downwards arrow key to move to the next position (pressing it three times works well). Press delete again and repeat until all of the holes are cut out.

4. Next we'll make the margin line. I used brown for the layout, but in the PSD I made it a pink-red to be more like real paper. Set the foreground colour to a pale red (#FF8A8A is good). Take the line tool and draw a vertical line from top to bottom. If you select the paper layer (Ctrl > Click), it'll keep within the page boundary.

5. There are two ways to make the horizontal lines. The hard way is to use the line tool and draw them separately, and the easy way is to make a pattern. So let's do it the easy way. Make a new document of width 1px and height 15px. You can increase or decrease the height depending on how far apart you want the lines to be. Now you will need to zoom in quite a lot to see the document properly. Select the pencil tool and draw a 1px tall mark at the bottom. Use whichever colour you want the line to be - I chose #CADBFF. Now define it as a pattern (Edit > Define pattern) and go back to your paper document and add a new layer. Make it a Fill layer (Layers > New Fill layer) and choose Pattern. Your new pattern should come up. Delete the first 65-70px of the pattern from the top and set the layer to Multiply (this allows the margin line to show through).

6. You now have a basic notepad page! The PSD file is below.

PSD File

7. The rest of this tutorial will teach you how to create a ripped, grungey paper. For ease, rotate the page 90° CW. Now select the Polygon Selection tool and over one of the hole create a jagged triangle. Delete the selected area. The first hole has been ripped!

8. You can either move to the next hole with this selection (hold down shift key and hit the right or left key a few times) or start a new selection. This is sometimes good because you get a bit of variation.

9. Keep deleting the selected areas, and with each one, move the selection around a bit - but never go too close to the bottom of the circle.

10. Once you've finished that, use some grunge brushes and with a creamy colour, stamp a few areas with the brush. Set the blending mode to Multiply and lower the opacity to around 20%. Try using other blending modes, colours and opacities to get the perfect grunge effect.