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In this tutorial, you’re going to learn how to make a trendy grunge style illustration/design in Photoshop. These techniques and this type of design can be used in a multitude of ways: advertising posters, CD covers, band design merch, etc. The possibilities are only limited by your creativity and how much time you want to put in to it. Let’s begin….

Step 1

In Photoshop, make a new document with a white background, size 500px wide and 350px high. Make a new layer, and set your foreground color to #f66eac and your background color to white. Now select the gradient tool, or hit G. Set the style to foreground to background. You’re gradient editor bar should look like this.

On your new layer, click and drag from the bottom left corner to the top right, to make a pink to white gradient effect. Take the opacity of this layer down to 20%. This is the background setup.

Step 2

Now, create a new layer. Grab the rectangular marquee tool, or hit M. Make a rectangle about 3/4 of the width, and whatever height you want. Set your foreground color to #f893c1.

Now fill the selection with this color. At the left end of the rectangle, make some slits in the rectangle by selecting a small section and hitting delete. Then rotate it a bit to angle it. Here is what it should look like.

Step 3

Now we’re going to add the grunge elements. For this, we’re going to use some good old brushes. We’re going for the splatter look here, so splatter, scribble etc. brushes will be great. Here’s a bunch of brushes on DeviantArt. Credit goes to the creators.

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/31656209/
http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/20284595/
http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/20653473/
http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/26360711/
http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/37376853/
http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/30591136/
http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/2753080/
http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/27338587/ - Splatter Paper

Create a new layer. This will be our grunge element layer. Basically, this is what you do. Alternate between black, grey, white, and pink (#f9aace), in your brushes. Start with pink, then add some more brushes in black, then finally add some white or grey grunge brushes on top. There really isn’t a right way to do this, or an easy explanation. Just build up the effect. I started with the Splatter Paper brushes to give it some texture, then I added the splatters in the lower left corner to add more “volume” to the design. Keep working with it until you have something you like. I suggest making a new layer for each brush, then you can control colors, opacity, and everything individually. Here’s what mine looks like to give you an idea.

Step 4

Illustration and design is all about creating a healthy balance in your images. If you look at what we have above, it looks cool, but there’s a lack of balance. The top right and left corners have no design elements in them. The worst thing you could do now is to go crazy and add a lot more splatter brushes there. We already have established our focal point as the lower left corner, and we need to keep it that way.

Make a new layer, and in the top right corner, we’re going to add a paper edge texture brush. Set the foreground color to a pink again, and apply the brush. If you don’t have any old paper brushes, here are some.

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/49355265
http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/24418586

Take the opacity of that layer down to 50% or so.

Now for the upper left hand corner. Let’s add a vectorish sunset element Grab this brush set.

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/43595897/

Now make a new layer, and with your foreground color still pink, in the top left corner add one of the brushes (the one starting at the top left corner and shining it’s ray’s down to the bottom right). We don’t want it to cover the whole design, so we’re going to fade it out. With the layer selected, go to Layer > Vector Mask > Reveal All. This has now added a vector mask to that layer. Hit D to reset your foreground colors to black and white. With a vector mask, whatever is white is shown, and whatever is black is hidden. So, grab the gradient tool again, and with it set to foreground to background (white to black), click in the top left hand corner and drag to the middle or so of the design. This now has created a nice gradient fade on our brush Here is what mine looks like after this step.

Step 5

Ok, we’re almost done. Now we’re doing to add our text. Choose whatever you want, I’m choosing a block/thick font style. Type whatever you want, I chose abstract. Make sure the color of the text is black. Now add a layer stroke to your text, 3 pixels wide and black in color. You’re probably wondering why we have black text, on black grunge elements, with a black stroke, but you’ll see in a second. Duplicate the text layer, and then hit Control - T. This is the transform tool. Now with the arrow keys, nudge it up once, and to the left once. Now double click the text, or hit enter to apply the transformation. Here’s a cool trick. Hold down Control, Alt, and Shift, and while holding those down, hit T about 5 times. This will duplicate the layer, and transform it again. So what you just did was add a 3d type effect, in about 3 seconds. Change the top text layer color to white. Looks good eh? Since this is a grunge style, the pure white text doesn’t blend too well. In the layer’s palette, with the text layer select, click the Lock Transparent Pixels button.

Now set your foreground color to black/dark grey, and choose a grunge brush and add some dirtyness to the font. Here is what mine looks like now.

Step 6

This is the final step. It’s really easy. You can end with the image above, but I like to have a lot of design elements in my work. Make a new layer under all the text layers. Grab the pen tool, and draw a curvy shape from the left to the right, making sure to keep it very thin. It’s going to end up being a wavy line. Right click with the pen tool, and hit make selection, and then fill the selection with black. Now you’re completely done.

To wrap it all up…

You’ve learned a lot of techniques in this tutorial: gradient fades, composition, 3d text effects. Use this with whatever other skills you know, and create something unique to you. This just teaches you how to make the effects, but now that you know it, use your imagination and make something awesome I hope you liked this tutorial, check back often for more.

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