mask

A lot of times, it is hard to find the type of texture you want to use for your project already as you want it. Many times I end up making very nice textures by taking a lot of raw stock texture photos, combining them into the same image as different layers, and then playing with transparencies, masking, and color. Some nice results can be achieved quickly this way, so let's do it! Note that for this particular guide, I am using Gimp but the concepts are all the same in Photoshop. First, I'm going to to think about what I want to make and find some stock textures to use.

Recently, I've made some artwork with some grunge and faded looks and some people have asked me how I did it. My answer is that I used the plasma clouds rendering filter in Gimp to do most of it. I was surprised that many people do not think to use procedural or rendering tools inside the masks themselves for layers to get some neat effects. It is really easy, so here is a quick how-to on making anything you could possible want appear grungy or faded. First off, here is an example piece of art I did that uses a ton of it: