Design a Rusty Old Building with Dusky Sky In Photoshop

Step 1

Create a new document sized 1000px * 800px, fill the background layer with Black.

Download the following textures from CG Textures and we will use them later on in this tutorial.

Old Building

Rust

Dusk

Grass

Step 2

Load the "Old Building" image into Photoshop, then use the Move Tool (V) to drag the entire image onto our document, resize it to the centre of the canvas:

Name this layer as "Old House". Use the Eraser Tool (E) with the following settings, remove the sharp edges of the building:

Step 3

Now we can add a bit of lighting contrast to the old house. I would like the upper side of the image to be brighter than the bottom part of the image.

Still on the "old house" layer, apply the following Curves Adjustments (Ctrl + M):

Then apply the following Levels Adjustment settings (Ctrl + L):

Then apply the following Black and White Adjusments (Ctrl + Alt + Shift + B):

The effect so far will look like this:

Step 4

Now we can give this old house some angle and perspectives so it looks not so boring and still.

I used the Free Transformation Tool (Ctrl + T) and apply Distort, Perspecitve and Scale techniques and make the image looks like this:

By doing so you can also expend the depth of the image so later on you will have greater flexibility to add more stuff onto it.

Step 5

Load the "Rust" image into Photoshop, select the centre portion of the image as shown below:

Copy and paste the selection back to our document, this will automatically create a new layer. Name it as "rust texture" and free transform it until it cover the old building:

Then apply the following Curves Adjustments (Ctrl + M) on this layer:

Then change the layer blending mode to "Soft Light" and you will have the following effect:

Step 6

The is an Optional Step: To further enhance the rusty effect, duplicate the "rust texture" once and go to Filter > Brush Storkes > Dark Stroke and apply the following settings:

Reduce the opacity of the duplicated layer to 60% and you will have the following effect:

Step 7

It still look a bit boring if there is just a building ono the canvas, then I thought: why not add some sky and cloud texture on top of building?

Load the "Dusk" image into Photoshop, select the centre portion of the image as shown below:

Copy and paste the selection to our document and name the layer as "dusk sky" and rotate and position the image as shown below:

Then apply the following Levels Adjustments settings:

And you the effect so far will look like this:

Step 8

We can now add some freshness into the image and it will somehow balance the feel of the image a bit so it won't look too dark.

Load the "Grass" image into Photoshop. Select a random portion of it as show below:

Copy and paste the selection onto our document and name the layer as "grass texture". Resize and position it as shown below:

Use the Eraser Tool with a big round brush, set the flow and opacity to 60% and 0% hardness, gently erase the centre portion of the grass texture so it reveal the old house:

I also duplicated the grass layer a couple of times and used the Clone Stamp Tool on the duplicated layer just to increase the density of the grass:

Step 9

To further enhance the lighting contrast and create some dynamic light for the image, we can create a new layer and use the Lasso Tool with a 40px feather, draw a few joint selection and fill them with Black and render some cloud:

Then apply the following Lens Flare Settings:

Then Apply the following Levels Adjustments:

Then change the layer blending of this layer to "soft light" and you will have the following image:

Then you can duplicate the lighting layer a few times and drag it to different positition where you want to add more light:

Ok that's it for this tutorial! The rest is left upon your own creativity :)

Below is my final image for this tutorial: (I added some more lighting effect and used some brushes I downloaded from qbrushes.com)

Hope you enjoy this tutorial and find it useful and inspirationa!

If you have any questions, just drop me a comment :)

Cheers and have a nice day!