Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Design Style Tutorial: GRUNGE URBAN ART

Being around with several simple tutorials about typography and general design using Photoshop, we will now move to specific design styles in a series that will continue for some time now, to start with Grunge Urban Art Style.

Before we step further, you will need sorts of design elements to create such design style. You don't have to worry, because all those design elements are actually available for free on the internet. I have great listings of Grunge Urban Art design resources just to help you to figure out what they're look like. When you use one of those resources, please credit the original designers for appreciation and read his or her design copyright before you apply them to your design.

There are certain design elements which are essential to establish a grungy vibes to your design. However, you don't need to use them all together at once, because these are just sorts of technique hints. They are:

1. Fonts and typography.
The best font type I suggest would be typewriter fonts or grunge fonts that have heavily texturized effect. Every kind of graffiti typography and industrial print alike are perfect example font styles.

2. Building or architectural background
Grunge style frequently related to urban style in particular. Urban life in the crowded city, with graffiti walls around. High rise building a photograph or the cityscape around your neighborhood will do for this purpose. Hence, you can pick: electricity towers, building construction works, or even a factory building as background or silhouette to your grunge design.

3. Color schemes
Mood in a grunge design often associated with black color. Black is a hint of power and superiority of a metropolitan society. Another dominant color that plays the role is dark grey, which is a sophisticated connotation of stone and concrete. You can find the complete color schemes suggestion in the resources lists.

4. Dirt noise textures
Creating grunge design is always been fun, because it's always associates with irregularity and erratic method. The best textures to use are splatters, blood, water colors, noise and scratch. You can apply these textures using Photoshop brush tool, or Photoshop pattern.

5. Miscellaneous vectors shape and image style
I've seen some grunge design styles that are also quite psychedelic. The common trends could have been light beams background shapes. A grunge floral vector that has erratic texture will work as well. If you need a photo or model to display, I recommend you to use pop art or line art Photoshop retouch effect.

Ow, by the way, this tutorial is just another way to create "grunge urban" design. You can find other similar Photoshop tutorials, photoshop goodies (brushes, patterns, and shapes), fonts, and vectors from other sites. If I missed something, you can just comment or even show me your own design to improve it :).

In this tutorial, I will show you how to create grungy wallpaper. One of my good friends, Abhinav Sood was so generous to let his photo being edited for this tutorial ;p. Thank you Abhi!

Design Style Tutorial: GRUNGE URBAN ART


OK, Lets begin with the tutorial:

Step 1 - Choosing colors
Depends on what kind of design that you want to create, it is very crucial for you to pick several colors (4-6 hues in a colors scheme) before you add another elements. Too much variation of colors will diffuse the design emphasis. You can take a look of the color scheme option in the resources list and pick 6 maximum of them that you think would be the best color combination.

Read More!

6 comments:

  1. very impressive tutorial about the grunge art style in urban area.
    Technically the term graffiti applies to designs scratched through a layer of paint or plaster, but its meaning has been extended to other markings. Graffiti is widely considered a form of antisocial behavior performed in order to gain attention or simply for thrills. But it also can be understood as an expressive art form.

    you can also read related article wrote by Prananda Navitas at:
    http://ar-chi-tect.org/graffiti-on-the-urban-surface/

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for linking to Inspirit in the post and also for featuring me as a model in your tutorial post.

    This is a really comprehensive resource for some of the coolest things that you can do, playing around with Photoshop. I loved this wallpaper you designed for me and then this tutorial that you shared with your readership.

    Wish you Good Luck.
    Abhinav Sood

    ReplyDelete
  3. Mas Andie,
    ya...great article to read also.
    I love graffiti walls created by some of local group artist in Surabaya. One famous graffiti group in Surabaya city would be "MONICA NEVER COMES" I've been starting to collect their works and I plan to write a post about them. Excellent pieces of artworks indeed. Your article would help me to figure out what refer to Graffiti in spesific manner. Thanks >:D<

    Abhinav,
    It's been fun to work with it, I told ya! Thank you very much for the nice words you gave. ;)

    ReplyDelete
  4. The first free Adobe Tutorials banner exchange program.
    It is free(no spam). it is set up just for rotating new Adobe tutorials among us and generating more traffic.

    Best.
    parviz

    ReplyDelete
  5. whoa?!! this is nice.. ived been trying to really clean vector art such as these but i cannot really perfect it... this is nice.. great job.. :)

    ReplyDelete
  6. butterfly valves,
    Thank you for stopping by and for the nice comment... been off from writing tutorials nowadays. Happy that this one is helping you :)

    ReplyDelete

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