Quicksilvers

Quick Silver

1. Create a new image, 200 x 100, 64M colours
2. Select medium gray and enter some text in a fine font
3. Apply Greg's Pool Shadow
4. Add some drop shadow

Quick Lead

1. Select Light Blue and enter some text
2. Ctrl-H to Feather the selection by 5 pixels
3. Select Light Gray foreground colour
4. Apply Hot Wax (once, twice or even 3 times)
5. Convert to Grayscale
6. You might want to up the brightness and contrast to taste.

Quick Mercury

1. Select Light Blue and enter some text
2. Ctrl-H to Feather the selection by 5 pixels
3. Select White foreground colour
4. Apply Hot Wax twice
5. Apply Sharpen More (Alt-I.S.H.)
6. Convert to Grayscale

   A slightly longer version of this is to apply the cutout 3D sequence just after step 1. You will certainly need to sharpen the image up after applying the grayscale.

Chunky Copper

1. Select Foreground and Background to White
2. Enter your chunky text
3. Apply the Cutout 3D sequence
4. Apply Hot Wax
5. Shift-B to Brighten the image up, try an extra 20 points of brightness
6. Shift-U to Apply colour, Red=40, Green=20, Blue=0 will give you copper.

   Or, apply other colours, like Red=0, Green=40, Blue=20 for a more glassy effect. And don't forget to add a little drop shadow to taste.

What else?

The trick with all of these is to try a few simple variations.

1. Repeating the hot wax effect gives quite a different image, although overdoing loses a lot.

2. Toggling from colour, to grayscale then back to colour gives you a metal base to colour up from.

3. The Cutout 3D trick always adds some solidity to a piece, which is almost mandatory when creating a metal text. But, if on the other hand you are creating metal plate, then skip the 3D stuff.

4. Always add drop shadow to taste, while it is the current fashion it already seems to be dropping out of use, so don't overdo it!