Grunge Typographic Design

This tutorial is very easy, suitable for Photoshop beginners. It uses 3 free brush sets, a free font and a halftone texture and a gradient set created by me – both downloadable from this post.

I hope you have fun creating this design!

Resources:

Halftone Textures from graphix1.co.uk

xPink Soda Brushes from brushking.eu

Watercolor Brushes from bittbox.com

28 Days Later Font from dafont.com

Vector Arrows Brushes from deviantart.com

Autumn Gradients from graphix1.co.uk

Step 1

From the Halftone Textures pack, open Halftone Texture 3

Duplicate the layer

Step 2

Create a new layer

Select the Brush tool, load xPink Soda Brushes and BB Watercolor Brushes

Set the foreground colour to a light-ish dirty colour of your choice

Choose a brush and resize it as required

Click once on the canvas

Place a selection of different colours and different brushes on the canvas, each on their own layer

NOTE: I found it better to use the xPink Soda brushes as the background and place the Watercolor brushes on top of them

Now go through your layers and change the layer mode – choosing between Multiply, Color Burn, Overlay and Soft Light – whichever mode gives the best effect for the layer.

Step 3

Merge together all the paint layers and the background copy layer

Rename this layer ‘paint’

Step 4

Image>Adjustments>Levels – apply the following settings or whatever looks good on your image:

Image>Adjustments>Brightness/Contrast – apply the following settings:

This is how my project looks at this point:

You should now have just 2 layers: Background and paint.

Step 5

Select the Type tool, 28 Days Later font, size 150pt, foreground colour black

You need to type each word of your text on a new layer – except the word ‘Bounce’ (or the word you are using in it’s place), which has to have each letter on a separate layer.

NOTE: There are no grammatical symbols supplied with this font. For the apostrophe I copied and pasted a portion of the top of the I: Type the word ‘It’s’, putting in the apostrophe – you will get the name of the font. Right click on the layer in the layers palette and click Rasterize Type. Using the Eraser tool, take out the name of the font between the t and s. Cut and paste the top portion of the I and place it close to the t. Now cut and paste the s and place it closer to the apostrophe. That was the easiest way I found to do it – you may be more comfortable using your own method!

Rasterize all the text layers

Step 6

Place the words as required

Merge together all the text layers except the layers making up ‘bounce’ and the ‘back’ layer

Move the letters of the word ‘Bounce’ into place, then using the Transform tool (Ctrl + T), slightly rotate every other letter

Merge the letter layers together, name the layer ‘bounce’

Step 7

Create a new layer above the paint layer

Select the Brush tool, Vector Arrows brushes, foreground colour black, set the opacity to 50%

Choose one of the arrows, resize it as necessary and click once on the canvas

Using the Transform tool (Ctrl + T), rotate and place the arrow so the tail is under the text and it points to the word ‘bounce’

Double click on the layer in the layers palette to bring up the blending options and apply the following Gradient Overlay, Drop Shadow and Outer Glow settings:

Step 8

Create a new layer below the bounce layer

Select another arrow and place and rotate it as in step 7.

Using the Transform tool (Ctrl + T) and with the back layer active, rotate the word ‘back’ as necessary. Right click within the transform box and click Flip Horizontal.

Copy and paste the blending options from the first arrow layer

Step 9

Create a new layer below the back layer

Make the adjustments and apply the blending options as before.

Step 10

Set the layer mode on all text layers to Overlay

That’s it! Here’s the completed project:

If you encounter any problems whilst working through this tutorial, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment below – I will be happy to help if I can.