Photoshop Tutorial: Destroyed Heraldry
Last month I published a set of Photoshop brushes called “Destroyed Heraldry” and there were a lot of requests for me to explain how I made them. So here it is, the destroyed heraldry tutorial. It is actually a lot simpler than you might think. It shouldn’t take long, so lets get started…
1. Start with some ink.
Start out by scanning a messy ink splotch (or find one around the web) and open it in Photoshop.
2. Levels
Hit Command/Control + L, or go to Image > Adjustments > Levels, and move the right slider to the left until the whites are pure white. You can tell by looking at the info palette (F8) as you hover over the white areas. While you have the Levels palette open, when you move the mouse around it turns into the eyedropper tool and reads out the values in the info palette. Anyway, get the whites all the way to white and hit ok.
2. Heraldry
Find some heraldry or scan some in from a book, and do the same thing as above. Make sure the whites are pure white by using the Levels palette. If you don’t have a book to scan, you can also use a vector. Just open it in Photoshop and put it on a layer above the ink.
Select your heraldry and copy/paste or drag it to your document.
Put it on a layer above the ink.
Now, change the “Layer Mode” of your heraldry to Multiply. This makes all of the pure white pixels invisible, eliminating the need to clip anything out.
3. New Fill Layer
Add a new layer underneath your two current layers.
Fill it with white by going to Edit > Fill or Shift + F5. You can also hit Shift + Delete.
4. Layer Masks
Select your ink layer, and add a layer mask by clicking on the Add Layer Mask button at the bottom of the layers palette.
Do the same for the heraldry layer.
5. Start Masking
Ok, now what we are going to do is use the brush tool, and some grungy texture brushes to ‘mask’ parts of both the ink layer and the heraldry layer to make them look like they were blended together a little nore naturally.
You can download and install my grungy texture brushes, or use your own. Now select the brush tool and a grungy brush you wish to use.
Start with the ink layer. Select the “Layer Mask,” not the layer itself and make sure your foreground color is set to black. Go back and forth between the 2 layer masks and keep stamping out parts of the images with your grungy brush/s until you are happy with the results.
As you stamp out parts of both layers with the grungy brushes, you’ll notice the 2 images becoming a little more happily blended together in a nice grungy fashion :)
And Keep going until you’re happy with what you see. That’s it. That is the process I used to create my “Destroyed Heraldry” brushes. I hope you enjoyed the tutorial :)
Nice one
Great tutorial, thanks for sharing.
awesome, thanks~!
Thanks for this. I have always wanted to make something like this. Now I can, and make it look good.
Just an FYI – I get Bittbox through RSS, and when I view it in my feed reader, all the images are replaced with “image hosted by” ones. That’s never been a problem, because I can just come to the actual site and view them there. But lately even on the site they still show up as “image hosted by”. It really makes your site/blog difficult to enjoy.
@mave
Which feedreader do you use? I can probably fix that :)
Jay
thanks for this! i’ll definitely being doing some of this in the future!
Thanks so much! I tried making this stuff earlier but it didn’t come out well. Blending with grungy brushes really helps.
Great tutorial, and I love the final design.
You always have killer tutorials. I enjoy keeping you on my iGoogle page.
Thanks.
Love it. Will have to give this a go sometime.
nice to see the tutorial. i imagined it was made this way but good for those out of the know.
Jay, that would be awesome if you could. I use LiveJournal to view my feeds.
http://syndicated.livejournal.com/bittboxfeed/profile
If it can’t be fixed it’s not a huge deal – I just get an image-less Bittbox, but I’ve still be following it.
@mave,
Try it now. Let me know if it works :)
Jay
Wow that looks awesome!
Loved the tutorial, I’m still fairly new at making my own brushes (started after seeing all the great brush packs other people were releasing), and this helps a lot. Layer mask tip is pro, thanks.
[...] Photoshop Tutorial: Destroyed Heraldry [...]
That was awesome!
very nice
Thanks
Really good tutorial here. Will have to give it a try and see what I can come up with. I will also have to download some of your free textures and brushes to use them in my graphic projects. Thanks.
Where did you get the Heraldry thing?
It’s great to get your freebies, but having this insight into your process is even better, because now I know how to do this on my own. Thanks a lot.
that’s wonderfull tips…
many thanks, more power!! more, more, more great ideas.
This website is awesome, I am so glad I found it. I could spend hours trying out all the stuff I have been reading on here.
great simple easy to follow instructions. thank you for sharing the technique.
[...] too bright and the colors did not fit with the site. Instead, I used some brushes created over at bittbox and painted with the green and white to match the blog. The brushes also give that graffiti, [...]