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 :)