Grunge Tag #2

Hello all! In this tutorial I will cover how to make a picture for your signatures. The style I will be covering is the grunge style. This style is very popular, and it is one of my favorite styles of art. It's very easy to create grunge works of art, and they look really neat, so let's get photoshoping!

1. Ok, image size is important. We don't want a huge image size that takes up giant space in our sigs. Let's go with an image that is 300 pixels wide and 80 pixels high.

2. Let's fill our first layer with clouds. Press "D" on your keyboard to set the colors back to black and white. Then click on Filter>Render>Clouds. Press "Ctrl+F" to continue to render clouds until you have what you like. This is what I came up with:

3. Brushes are the key to good grunge art. If you don't have any grunge brushes then just search google for photoshop grunge brushes and download some.

4. Create a new layer called "brush".

5. Choose one of your grunge brushes and go ahead and paint your canvas a little. The key is to place the grunge brush and only paint it in one area. Don't click and drag your mouse around.

6. Right click your "brush" layer and click "Blending Options...".

7. In the dropdown box called "Blend Mode" choose "soft light", and set the opacity to somewhere from 65 too 100.

8. A nice touch is switching between white and black for the color of your grunge brushes.

9. Create a few layers and brush them up with different grunge brushes to your liking.

10. Now we are going to create some patterns that will give us a nice scanline effect on our image.

11. Click File>New, and then set the image size to be 3 pixels wide by 3 pixels high.

12. We are going to make a pattern. Click on the pencil tool, or press "B", and draw something that looks like this:

13. Now click Edit>Define Pattern... and give your pattern a name.

14. Repeat steps 11 - 13 and create these patterns:

15. Ok, now that we have our patterns, go back to our sig and create a new layer called "pattern".

16. Click Edit>Fill and then select "Pattern" from the "Use:" dropdown box. Choose one of your patterns that you made and click "Ok".

17. Right click the layer called "Pattern" and click on "Blending Options...".

18. In the dropdown box called "Blend Mode" choose "overlay", and set the opacity to 8.

19. Create a new layers for the other 2 patterns you made and follow steps 16-18 again setting the opacity at 9 and 10 respectively to the new layers.

20. Create a new layer called "color".

21. Choose a color of your liking in the color palette area then go to Edit>Fill... and choose "Foreground Color" from the "Use:" dropdown box.

22. Right click the "color" layer and click on "Blending Options...".

23. In the dropdown box called "Blend Mode" choose "overlay", and leave the opacity at 100. You can set it a little lower if you want.

24. Here's what I came up with:

25. Text is the icing on the cake. You can using arial fonts and just use a grunge brush and use the eraser tool to erase out parts of the letters, or your can use grunge fonts that you can download off of the internet. Try using colors on your font that contrast the background.

26. You can add some flavor to your image by adding simple shapes and just being creative with the way you arrange stuff. Be creative!

27. Here's my final result:

Well, that's it for this tutorial. I hope that you guys found some of these techniques useful, and maybe some of you discovered a totally new style of art.

Enjoy!