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PROJECTS: A Grunge Experiment


J

Jeremy W.

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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.

____________________________________

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:

man-standing.jpg


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:

image1.jpg


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

image2.jpg


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:

image3.jpg


___________________________

Next phase, I'll keep working the image, start adding grunge elements, pick a colour, etc :)
 
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:
image7.jpg


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

image8.jpg


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:

image9.jpg


This makes our image look like this:

image10.jpg


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:

image11.jpg


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:

image12.jpg


____________________

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 :)
 
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):

image15.jpg


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:

image18.jpg


By simply selecting the red with Select > Colour Range:

image19.jpg


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

image20.jpg


________________________

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

image21.jpg


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

image22.jpg


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:

plat.jpg
 
Great work Jeremy :righton: 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:righton:
 
Wow! Really cool image there, Jeremy! :righton: Very emotional...
I've never tried "grunge", but I'd like to. Thanks for the details on your approach. :D
 
Gaussian: Sorry, I can make them all links if you'd like, I have no problem with that :)

J
 
No Jeremy, you can just leave it for now. Just make sure that if you plan to use IMG tags that refer to files that are let's say larger than 50k, that you put only one IMG tag in one post. This way the posts will automatically be spread over multiple pages. Also for tutorial reasons it's not always necessary to use compression ratings like 60 or higher for JPG; 50 will be sufficient in most cases. In some cases even GIF with a small amount of colors will save even more space.
We ask people to keep the maximum size of one single post under 150k.
It is however really appreciated to stay under 50k

Trust me, I hate to bring up these guidelines, but they are needed to keep control over our bandwidth and also to keep this site accessible for members/visitors with 56k modems (there are still a lot of them).

I know that you understand.

Again, great stuff Jeremy :righton::)
 
Is bandwidth an issue? Where is the site hosted?

J

ps: I hear ya :)
 
This is a bit difficult as I feel divided inside...I have thought for severaldays how to reply to this subject...

I do like the technical quality of your work: colour, composition, insight etc are at a very high level. But I have problems with the subject. Not only because of the hopelesness and the sheer nihilitic pessimism that radiates from it (that's personal: I defend my happiness), but also because it lacks artistic elegance. If I were some moral knight, I'd say "one should not use photographs of such horrible subjects for artistic purposes". I am not a moral knight, but I do get a slimy feeling, a dirty taste in my mouth and my eyes run dry.

I know: nowadays you can privately enjoy/feel-repelled-but-still-wanting-to-look to people blown into pieces by some mad berserker, or find the defecation of modern artists in musea and galleries (how well they read Freud and accept his reductionnist theories that "man is nothing but..."), or see misery, hate and depression being praised as the highest goals.

Yet I, who come from Medieval Times, I have problems with this. I am too intelligent to accept nihilism, too human to accept the limits of cynicism, too inspired to fall for ideas, too anarchistic to accept reductionnism, too madly in love with life to become depressed and too sensitive to not be shocked when a photograph of an innocent man who knows that he is going to die senselessly is used for so-called artistic purposes, even when the excuse should be that the artist wants to protest and warn agains blahblah. And I'm not the only one.

As said: this has nothing to do with your knowledge of Photoshop or your artistic skill. Only with a lack of some human "elegance".
No offence meant.
 
You are entirely entitled to your opinion. In fact, except for the "don't use photos like this because it is disrespectful" bit I completely agree. This piece was conceived, created and will soon be sent to press for one reason:

To help me remember.

I suppose I could have hired a photographer and gone and done some shots, but this piece, is no different than a documentary or than certain war-time movies.

I'd understand if you had a similar problem with all of the above. Heck, I'd even understand if you only had a problem with my piece. It wasn't done for anyone else, it was done for me. My wife won't let me hang it at home. My work won't let me hang it here.

I understand everyone's perspective, but this has become a deeply personal piece which isn't about rejection or depression, which I hardly ever feel, but about remembering. It isn't about disrespecting the subject, quite the contrary it is about remembering what happened.

This is the third group I've shown this to, and each group has had someone literally insulting me. I'm glad you aren't, and I appreciate your candour.

I'm not a shock artist, and this is likely the most deeply moving personal piece I've ever done. I'm sorry to have offended you.
 
Jeremy nice to see that your a true artists and can accept praise and criticism alike without starting a flame war.
 
You have not offended me, and you need not say that you're sorry. I only believe that looking back is the quickest and shurest way to fall. I did writre though that I am not a moral knight, on the contrary.

First of all, imo the word "grunge" did not link to you wanting to remember (English is not my native language, and sometimes there are nuances I don't understand), and secondly doing a tut with this image did not give the impression of it being so personal.
I do respect you as a human being with your own character, and as a photoshop artist whose presence on this forum adds a lot to its quality.

And whatever might be written: it hurts to see this image.Still: there is already so much emphasis on negativism, hopelesness and hate in the daily dose of this collective nightmare that some take for reality, that I personally do feel the need to counterbalance. But this might lead us too far into philosophy etc, and this forum isn't the place for that.

Glad you felt that I really didn't want to offend you either. I associated grunge with shock , and that may be wrong. If so, please explain what "grunge" means to you.
 
Hey,

Thanks for your honest. Grunge is just the name of the style. It's one which throws lines, etc to the winds and attempts to bring order out of chaos.

For instance, normal brushes are often used for drawing, are often lines, etc. Grunge brushes tend to be "dirt" or "dust" type of brushes. The kind you'd dab with.

It's not about being a rebel or spraypainting or being a "punk" or anything like that, which is something I could imagine you associating the style with had you not seen it before.

Some Grunge stuff is shock-value. I've seen it. I dont' like it. At all :)

J
 
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