PROJECTS: A Grunge Experiment

[Jeremy W.]

Alright, this is the second of the PROJECTS threads (I'm hiding this first, you can have it if you ask ;)). I'm sure few of you aware of the TECHNIQUES threads, well this is an extension to allow you to not only learn the tools but how to use them.

The point of these is not so much to learn how to do a given effect, but to allow you to stretch your mind and learn how it all "comes together". I'll be taking a project and walking you through it. Where necessary I'll point to tutorials on the web, tutorials I've done or TECHNIQUES threads so that it doesn't become too huge. The goal, after all, is for those who are already familiar to extend their expertise by doing a "task".

If you are following this, consider it homework to come up with your own similar (but not identical) design. Mine will simply be an example of one way of going about what the PROJECT is.

Your second PROJECT is to create a Grunge piece which evokes emotion. Sure, we could all simply make "a grunge piece", but the Grunge style itself is meant to evoke emotion.

I am EXPECTING people to post their images so that we can work on them together.

This will take a while, so please don't post between instances, until I'm done.

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Okay, our first step, and that which will really define how the piece plays out, is to figure out:

1. The dimensions
2. The primary colour/feel

I'm going to go with a longer image, since I'm sick of square ones, and I'm going to go with something dark. I'm really going to try and create something which is darkly emotional, since that's how I feel. Something which at one instance shocks you and makes you go "ewww", and at the other makes you want to look deeper. We'll see how I do, shall we? ;)

For dimensions I've chosen 300 x 1200, filled in black (72dpi since this is for the web). I'm using Photoshop. Sorry to those who are following along, I'll only be detailing what I'm doing in PS6, so other apps and other verisions will need to suffer (this'll be long enough as it is).

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, DA was being slow, so I went off to Google and did an image search for "man standing". About 7 pages in I found the perfect image:



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

After dragging it into my image, we have this:



Obviously, I want the length of this guy's body to basically fill the screen, so I resize the image to something like this:



Next, I want to remove a lot of the superfluous stuff around our main character, so I use a layer mask, so that I don't lose any of the original image, should I need it later.

I've painted away some of the useless stuff, and here is what I have now:



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Next phase, I'll keep working the image, start adding grunge elements, pick a colour, etc

[Jeremy W.]

Okay, my main goal in this step is to pick a colour, add some things in and start making this look really "grungy".

Before we begin, I have 3 standard Adjustment Layers I use for Grunge stuff. The settings change, but the use of all 3 of them gives me a lot of control.

Here they are:

http://server2.tacf.org/examples/image4.jpg

And here are the details:

Hue/Saturation:
http://server2.tacf.org/examples/image5.jpg

Levels:
http://server2.tacf.org/examples/image6.jpg

Brightness/Contrast:


And, here is the image with my default settings, pretty much starting to look a little better, eh?



Okay, it's time for some serious Grunge Texturing and so on. Basically, when I do these, I'll download a whole load of brushes from around the web (here's the best spot though), and then start dabbing these grunge brushes onto the palette, as I explained here.

After some various dabbing with a variety of brushes, I've come up with this, obviously for yours, you'll want to concentrate your dabbing where you want to accent stuff the most:



This makes our image look like this:



At this point, I'm realising that the top part of the image is looking a little hazy, there's really nothing happening there. So, I go back to our original image and take the top portion of it, since it has a lot of detail and texture. Here's the top portion I like:



When I turn my blackness layer back on, add some more dibs and dabs, I get something which is starting to make this come together nicely:



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This has been way too straight forward, and I can already see the end in sight. Plat is gonna love this ;) Next one I'll continue adding in various layers of grunge stuff, and I might even finish this off with some cool text and burns

[Jeremy W.]

Okay, looking at the image, I really don't like the right side. I generally hate colours running solidly onto my borders in Grunge pieces anyways, and since I'm going for an elongated feel, I might as well get rid of it.

One of dub's brushes is a gorgeous "erratic vertical stroke" which looks like this:

http://server2.tacf.org/examples/image13.jpg

By taking this, rotating it a little, and placing it alongside, I get an effect which I'm actually happy with:

http://server2.tacf.org/examples/image14.jpg

I'm going to keep on doing some dabbing at this later on, since it's so cluttered, but I want to actually get some burns and darkening happening. Because of my adjustment layers up top, I know it doesn't really matter what colour my burn strokes are, or how erratic they are either.

So, I'm going to do just a few different layers, which basically look like this (before their blending mode is turned to colour burn):



Basically, I've got a few which are 100% burns, and others which are 30-50% burns. The 100% ones will actually burn black right into the image. The 30-50% ones will burn whatever the Hue/Saturation colour is into the image. It's a great technique, and one which I'll probably use more of in this image.

Here's the image with the burns turned on:

http://server2.tacf.org/examples/image16.jpg

I really like how this is coming together, his eyes are starting to get exactly how I want them to be, very haunting.

I don't like how the bottom of the image is looking, so I'm going to need to burn that out as well. One of the techniques which I've found to be really effective in grunge work, to create a randommy feel, is to take an existing image, increase the contrast/brightness, and then select one of the stronger colours and use that selection as a random basis.

Here's the image I used:

http://server2.tacf.org/examples/street00002.jpg

By increasing it's contrast to like 100, I get a very bright red area I can select as a random filler pattern:



By simply selecting the red with Select > Colour Range:



I now have an area I can fill in with black, and then burn into my main image so it looks more like this:



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Well, for now that's about it. In my final post I'll add in some text to blow plat's mind ;)

[Jeremy W.]

Okay, time to go hunt for some Grunge Fonts. I found I really liked SimSun, as it isn't too chunky, and isn't too "normal" either. Serif fonts are normally really good for Grunge work, the more intense the serif's the better (often artists will extend the caps on certain key letters to make it even more impacting, but I'm not that intense ;)).

Since I know the story to this picture (and it's one of the reasons this is so moving), I figured I'd simply make the picture the story.

Something like "Four Men Walked Into The Gas Chamber... Only One Returned".

I'll make the text white, drop it on the picture, and let's see what happens



Not too bad The image still needs something though... The text is just sitting there...



Really, the image is just about done. I'm not happy about the text, it looks too "fresh", so I've dabbed some more dark spots on all around the text, and I've also added the words "Dead man Walking" into the image.

And, really, that's it!

Here's the final image:

[ApWizard]

WOWOWOWOWOW, beautiful one! I Never seen 1 like this


regards

[samifox]

Im impressed...Well done Jeremy W

[sfm]

cool Jeremy it looks very emotional
sfm

Great work Jeremy and again nice to see someone putting all that work into it to show some interesting stuff.
It's also nice to see all the steps involved that lead to a project like this; something that we don't see too often. Very interesting and instructive.

It was however necessary for me to remove the IMG tag for the file street00002.jpg. This file is almost 800 KB and would take modem users about 2.5 minutes to download and that's just too much for this thread that already contains a lot of files.

Be aware that using a lot of IMG tags will slow down the board, especially when you know that you can put more images on a thread's page with IMG tags then if one would use single attachments, so try to place single IMG tags in one post, so that the bandwidth will be spread over several pages. This page was 1,400 KB in total and those 4 1/2 minutes for modem users to open it, is just way to long.
I do hope that you understand.

I will however turn a blind eye to the sizes this time, but try to keep them as small as possible Jeremy B7

Thanks for showing us these detailed steps

[Bobzworld]

good post Jeremy, thanks

[wbiss]

Wow! Really cool image there, Jeremy! Very emotional...
I've never tried "grunge", but I'd like to. Thanks for the details on your approach.