Grunge Tag

Ok this tut is to show you how to make a simple grunge tag which you can often find on forums underneath a users post.

1. Open up photoshop. Make a new canvas/document(ctrl+N). When making a sig u should not make it too big(it makes it impractical to use as a signature in a forum) and you should now make it too small (then its just too small). I am going to do the sig.... 330x100pixels.

2. Now get some grunge brushes. They can be downloaded from anywhere. Try google or deviant art. There are some grunge brushes to download from the download section of this site . Try making your own too.

3. Make a new layer, and brush around a bit.Not too much though. Here's how mine looks-

4. Make a new layer, and brush a bit more. Set the blend mode of the layer to soft light.

5. Make a new layer and brush around a bit more. Change the blend mode again. You could try using 'overlay' or any other modes that look good, even just normal could work fine. Don't worry about the sig being black and white since we will add colour later on. Here's how mine looks now-

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6. Now to add colour .... layer>new adjustment layer> color balance. Mess around with the color settings until you get what you want.

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7. Here is my finished result for the background -

Now I am going to add a small picture and blend it into the background. I am going to blend this picture into the background -

8. Use the move tool and drag the pic to the background. Don't worry about the bits you don't want

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So you should now have-

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9. Lets flip the picture around (horizontally). Make sure you are on the picture layer. Go to Edit>Transform>Flip Horizontally. Or you could press ctrl+T and right click on the transformation box which appears around the picture and select flip horizontally.

10. Change the pictures blend mode to anything that looks good. I put mine to hard light

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11. Now that blue stuff doesn't look too nice does it? Simply use the eraser.. make sure you use a SOFT round brush sop that when you erase around the edges of the picture, the pic gets blended in a bit. Here's mine-

12. Now you just need to add text. I used a font called Bauhaus-Heavy and set the font's layer mode to overlay. Since it was not dark enough I duplicated it (Ctrl+J) After duplicating the text was too dark so i brought the opacity of it down a bit.

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13. Now you just need to add a border. I used a simple 1 pixel border. To do this just make a new layer on top of the sig, and press ctrl+A and Edit>Stroke (and made sure the stroke is on the 'inside' of the selection. Here is my finished piece after some tiny changes.

Easy wasn't it. This was a tut showing you the 'basics' of making a quick grunge tag. There are plenty of other ways to make grunge sigs... I just hope you learnt something from this.