Grunge Type Photoshop Tutorial

Ok, today we are going to look at how to make grunge / worn style type to use in your art. The process is actually quite simple, and you can get endless variations.

Adam Woodhouse www.adamwoodhouse.co.uk

Step 1 - Setting up our canvas

Ok, first step is pretty straight forward. All we are going to do is open Photoshop, and create a new canvas ( File > New ) and I am going to create a canvas 640px wide by 300px high.

We are going to add a background colour, so using the paint bucket tool (Shown below) we are going to simply click on the background layer with our selected colour. I am going to use a shade of dark red as my background colour:

Step 2 - Creating our type

We are now going to select the Horizontal Type Tool, which is the big “T” in the tools panel (Circled Below), we could also hit the “T” on our keyboard to select it. This will add an array of options at the top of the screen where you customize your font. I’m going to select the font “Coolvetica” ( which you can download free from here ) set at 172px and in the colour white.

Step 3 - Rasterising our type

Now we have our type set up, we are going to make it raster rather than vector (which it is currently in) - Raster means it can’t be scaled without pixelisation basically. We do this by going to the layers panel, right clicking on our type layer and clicking ” Rasterise Type” from the list.

Step 4 - Erasing the edges

Now we have our raster type on the canvas, we can start it edit its form directly. We need to select the “Eraser tool” from the tools menu - Eraser or press “E” on our keyboard. Then our tool menu will change at the top of the screen. We need to select the “Oil Pastel Large” brush.

We now need to just erase the edges of our type by clicking on our type layer and erasing around the type itself.

We can change the brush, and get a more varied effect, or even create your own brushes to erase with!

Step 5 - Adding effects

We can just as easily add grunge to the type now, instead of erasing it. So I’m going to select the “Brush Tool” from the tools tab (Or press B on the keyboard) and selecting a rough brush from the list. I’m going to use a variation of brushes from the predefined ones in Photoshop.

We could also look at rotating our type slightly to add a more random effect. We can do this by selecting the transform rotate tool from the menu ” Edit > Transform > Rotate” then rotating slightly to add that more random look, hit Enter on your keyboard to apply the transformation

Step 6 - Finalizing your type

Now we have our grunge type, its time to experiment! Now experimentation is the best way you can learn Photoshop, you can play with the tools and filters to really create some masterpieces or monsters! Don’t be afraid to experiment people

I’ve created loads of brushes for people looking to experiment to download for free, you can grab them here! After playing around with the brushes from my own collection this is what I managed to knock up in about 5 min’s!