Grunge Textures and You, Graphics Course by Senator Seth

Mod Note: This course has been completed, but feel free to follow the Navigation links at the end of this post to use the tutorials.

Greetings students!

Well I thank all of you that signed up for this course! I hope that in the end that you will walk away with some greater graphics knowledge at least in some regards or another.

Okay so for this introduction I just want to post a very small bit about me, most of which you got from the sign-ups actually, and then just let you know what we'll be getting into a little bit for this month.

First off, I'm non-official freelance graphics artist. Supernatural is what started it all and I have since then expanded a little and trying to expand some more into spaceart, abstract art, multi-fanart, photography and other general graphics works. You can check all my "better" works out at my DeviantArt Gallery or you can view more of my supernatural works at my thread here on this board (just skip towards the end...I swear it gets better ). I've been doing graphics for 3 years and always like to consider myself a student at all times from everyone because I enjoy learning new things dealing with graphics.

And now on to something much more interesting...this course! As I said before, I hope that you all walk away from this lesson with at least something valuable that you can add to your graphics works. I looked at the list of people that signed up, and we have a great mixture of both new people to graphics, and people that are at much higher levels. So the first thing that I would like to bring up, which should be the obvious, is that I'm going to be trying to write these tutorials in as simple terms as I can get them for the new people. So if you think you know the basics...I'm pretty sure that you can skim through and still get the result...or you may need to go back and re-read some of the parts. But the main point is patience...especially because I like to get long winded and can talk and talk and talk...and talk forever. Second thing that I would ask of everyone is that I would like to treat this as if it was a course you would take at school. If you don't understand something or my directions are totally not making sense to you for whatever reasons, feel more than free to post something in the lesson saying what you're having problems/issues with and I'll come and try to help you the best I can, but also I'm very open to fellow "classmates" to help each other with problems (especially PS users if something doesn't translate well).

Okay, so in this course itself, you will be learning how to blend textures into a very simple banner to produce a grunge feel to it. Now I've broken down the overall goal into three very small and hopefully easy steps...which will be each lesson. And for the final project, you're welcome to do anything as extensive as you want as long as it meets the final goals and guidelines. Just a sneak peek into the lessons, in the final lesson we will be doing a little...or maybe a lot with "Layer Masks" and texts. I don't know how Layer Masks translate into PS, I think it's real easy if I remember correctly, but I might be mistaken. It might be wise to look into that before the lesson starts, just to be sure you know where it is when we get there.

And I think that's about all. I really look forward to starting this class and getting through this project together with you all.

The class will be starting:

Saturday September 13th

Thanks again to everyone that signed up and I greatly hope that you enjoy the class!!:D See you all Saturday!

Thanks,
Senator Seth of the UGS

P.S. As bonus material, which I believe everyone one in graphics should know, there is a group of extremely extremely talented artists in a group called The Luminarium. They are absolutely an amazing group of artists to check out. They have stunning works of not only digital art, but photography as well. They are simply an amazing group and I strongly recommend that everyone visit their site and give them a look over (I usually do in times when I need inspiration ).

Navigation:
Lesson 1 - Enhancement
Lesson 2 - Textures
Lesson 3 - Adding Text
Final Project

This post has been edited by grkgrl88 on Aug 2 2009, 04:06 PM

I can't wait to start and thanks for the site I'll go look over the amazing work there.

Can't wait to start:)

I'm looking forward to this course!! WOOHOO!!

few more days only...!

I can't wait!

Can't wait to try something new!!

thank you so much for everything,I can't wait

can't wait!!! and that site rocks!! thanx for the link.

Amazing work at that site. I'm excited about the class!

Can't wait, though I don't know when I'll get it posted.

I'm gimpless and suffering from withdrawals

I may have some problems with this as my NEW laptop has died, which is very annoying so I don't have GIMP right now.
But I can't wait for this to start, will have to sneek on to a computer with GIMP.

I'm so excited!!! Thanks for the link; it was really cool!!

Greetings and welcome to the first lesson of Grunge Textures and You! Before we begin, I must warn that the screencaps I'm providing will be somewhat large for some people with standard sized monitors. I have a widescreen monitor with dimensions of 1680x1250 so...it's a little big. However, I did try to limit the number of full monitor shots and I tried to make them as small as I could. Also, like I said in my introduction, if you are having a lot of trouble with anything, please feel free to post your question(s) in here and we as a class can help each other. Oh, and all resources will be posted at the bottom of the lesson, ex: images, brushes, etc.

Now let's begin:

Enhancement:

In today's lesson you will be learning how to do basic enhancements in The GIMP, this lesson should be really easy to translate over to Photoshop (PS) for those of you that are using that program.

Let's begin by doing the basics for any image...open a new canvas, for this course your canvas will be 400x125. Also, you will notice in that screen capture that I have the advanced settings down and that I have increased the resolution to 100.00 pixels/in for both the "X" and "Y", I like to do this so that the image has a better quality.

With your new canvas open, the next step is to open an image to work on for this course. Because I like to keep things simple, I would like everyone to open up just one image on their canvas, I don't want to deal with doing this to multiple images just yet. I strongly suggest that you use a promo pic from SupernaturalMedia's Legacy because they're good high quality images. To open a new image on to the canvas, the easiest way is to go File>Open As Layer. Screen Capture (The image I'm using is posted at the bottom of the lesson)

Now with your image layer open, simply scale it down to the right size for your canvas. Now the reason why I don't have any screen shots of this is because this could be different for everyone depending on the image you used. For me, I scaled my image right to 400 width to see how that looked and I really liked that. (If you are using a different image than I am, I suggest that you just play around with scaling the layer until you find dimensions that you like) Now with your image layer scaled and situated well on your canvas, we can begin the real enhancements.

The first enhancement I like to make is Sharpen. Here are my Sharpen Settings and in general while sharpening keep in mind that you want to just sharpen the image enough to bring out a sharp clear aspect, but not so much that really sharp ugly lines come through. If you're new to the sharpen tool, I suggest that you play around with the settings a little bit with preview on and see what the image is like with no sharpen vs. a little sharpen vs. a lot of sharpening.

The next enhancement I made was Levels. Levels are a really nice way to simply bring out the highlights and the shadows of an image all at once. Here are my Level settings and if you're computer/your version of GIMP is like mine, then I really suggest that you either drag and drop the little triangles or simply put your mouse over the numbers right below the triangles and scroll either up or down to change the numbers but also have your levels window out of the way so that you can see the image at the same time (When I say "triangles" I mean the set closest to the top...there should be three of them in that one bar...one at the right end that is white, one in the middle that is gray, and one at the left end that is black). This is like having a preview for your levels before you hit okay, which is really nice. This is what mine looked like after levels.

The second to last enhancement that I made to this signature was Curves. Now this is the step for this lesson that really give you the freedom to do whatever you want and to really start making this signature your own. Curves is a really great way to play around with colors and see what really works for you and your sig. As with levels, I suggest that you move your curves window out of the way of your sig so that while you're playing around with the curves you can see what your signature will look like, which is an excellent preview. This is what my curves kind of looked like, just for the red spectrum. If you look up in the left hand corner, you will see a pull down option list that has Value, Red, Green, Blue, and Alpha. These are the different color aspects of the image that you can effect. Value, as you can guess, is the general highlights and shadows (much like levels only in a different format), red effects the red colors of highlights and shadows, and so an and so forth with the rest of the colors and options. The far right hand of the curves effects the highlights and the far left hand side effects the shadows. The only way to get used to curves is to play around with it a lot and to see what you like and what you don't like. For mine, I had a standard setting that I really liked saved which I used and really liked the out come. If you would like to know either generally or exactly what I did, just post something here saying you would like that information and I'll post it for you. This is mine after Curves.

And the final enhancement that we are going to make today is to add a border! The first thing to do when adding a border is to add a new layer. This is so your border is separate from your image and can thus be moved above or below other layers to come. The next thing to do is to Select All. After you click on this, then all the moving "ants" should be going along the edge of your canvas. Okay, so before going any further make sure that you are on your new layer and then you can go Stroke Selection which is the easiest way to make a good solid border. Before you do this though, please look at your image and see what color border works best for you. My general rule is that if you have a dark image then a white border is good...if it's a bright light image then a black border is good, but other colors can come in as well...I just prefer the nice simple and clean look of either white or black borders. For this image I have decided that white would be a good color because it's somewhat dark. Make sure that the color you want is first in your gradient color options. Whatever color is first is the color that you are going to have in your stroke. Now once you get to stroke selection this is the window you should have, and those are the settings that I used for my image. You can play around with what size border you want but I suggest for this size canvas that it should be between 2-6 pixels, but you can play around and see what works for you. And then all you have to do is click "Stroke" and you're done!!....With part one.

Here was my final result for lesson one:


And that's all we're going to do for today. Once again, if you have any problems or questions about anything covered today, please don't be afraid to post something and ask for help.

Thanks so much and I hope that you learned a few new things today or at lease had fun getting this project going.

Your homework is to complete a signature like what was explained in today's lesson with the dimensions of 400x125 pixels and using only one image. Please save this signature as both a .xcf file (or .psd if you're a PS user) and a .png file so that you can come back and work on it later...this is the signature that you are going to be using for the remaining lessons in this course so please don't save it so you can't work on it anymore.

Homework is due on:

Friday September 19th

And the next lesson will be posted:

Saturday September 20th

Thanks,

Seth

Image Used: Promo Image - From: Supernatural Media

Here is my try. I am so excited for the rest of this lesson.

Cool we did the same picture. I might make another one with the picture I original wanted to do but I was having trouble making it fit the canvas. I need a thick line cause I had some white on the side.



Here my other one. The picture really can't handle a banner size if it's the only picture. It does have a black boarder.




Oh Seth I have to say thank you for the pictures of the steps your doing. For a dyslexic it really helps me understand want your doing and if I'm hitting the right think. So thanks and I hope you include them in all your other lessons.

Here's mine. However, it became darker than it was in my PS. I guess I need to change setting again.