Design Project - Get Grunge

After my last Techniques article on Grungy Fun, it became quite apparent that people needed a real world example of what exactly a Grunge piece was, and how to create one.

Before I get into the deep and dirty, I want to clarify 3 things. First, before last week I hadn't opened Photoshop in 3 months. Second, I'll be writing this article from the Photoshop perspective, but, so long as your graphics application allows for layers, adjustment layers and custom brushes, you should be fine. Finally, I am not a "Grunge Master". In terms of learning and experience I am really more of a "Novice". That said though, hopefully what I write here will allow others to go further than I have with this emotive art style.

The Story

Before I get into the "How", it is often important to decide the "Why". Why are you creating a Grunge piece? My reason was simple. I was involved in a Photoshop Tennis match at SitePoint Forums and wanted to floor my competitor in the first round.

As far as the emotion behind the piece, I was looking for something truly dark and brooding. Not so much freaky, as "stirring". I wanted it to be a piece that I knew I would want to hang on my wall, but not really show anybody because of the comments I might receive. You could say I was trying to design a love/hate relationship.

The Basics

Right, now we need to get down to the nitty gritty. Our first step --- the one that will really define how the piece plays out -- is to figure out:

1. The dimensions of the piece


2. The primary colour/feel

I'll design a longer image, as I'm sick of square ones, and I'm going to go with something dark. I'm really trying to create something that's darkly emotional. Something that shocks you, but at the same time, makes you want to look deeper. We'll see how I do, shall we?

For dimensions I've chosen 300 x 1200 pixels, filled in black (72dpi since I'm designing this image for the Web). First off I need to find a picture. To be honest, I only go 3 places for pictures:

• www.intuitivmedia.net
• www.deviantart.com (stock photos)
• www.google.com

I'm looking for a full-body shot of a man looking dejected. I tried intuitivmedia, but they didn't have much, and DA was slow, so I went off to Google and did an image search for "man standing". About 7 pages into the results, I found the perfect image:

It's a striking image, because it's a real picture of 4 guys just before they were sent to the gas chambers in Nazi Germany. The emotion I'm going for is palpable even at this early stage.

The Canvas

Every artist has a canvas, and ours is looking very empty and black right now. In this first series of steps we'll simply import our image, give it some boundaries and generally open the lid.

Our first step is to drag our image onto our canvas, which results in this: