Tutorial: Creating architect/grunge style wallpaper

Motivation / Intro

You will learn to create a wallpaper that is a mix of "grunge" and "architect style".

Tutorial details

Creative Commons License
This work by Bernhard Stockmann is licensed under the Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported terms.
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  1. 1

    Preparations: .abr files are Photoshop brushes, but GIMP can read them too. Install the two brush packages from above (= download, copy to GIMP’s brushes folder and restart GIMP). I have got them from deviantart.com.

  2. 2

    At first we create an empty image with 1440×900 px size and white background. Then we need a good-looking grunge background. Choose some random installed brushes and scale them to 4,00. Important: Set the brush drawing opacity to 15% to achieve a unified look.

    Then apply the brushes. Use the grunge brushes of KeReN-R first.

  3. 3

    Click on the working area a few times, each time a little bit shifted. Let your fantasy flow …

  4. 4

    … a little more …

  5. 5

    Now use the abstractvsgrunge2_byalias brushes. Go on and apply some of the brushes to the image. Maybe you want to scale the brushes down again to create some sharp details.

  6. 6

    Now we adjust the image’s contrast so that there are more medium shades of gray.

    - Colors / Brightness-Contrast: -25 | -20

  7. 7

    Now we colorize this background:

    - Colors / colorize: see screenshot values

  8. 8

    Then we add some more bright and dark details:

    - Foreground color: choose 877c00
    - New transparent layer: Set layer mode to “Addition”.
    - Select a detailled brush: Paint with 40% opacity (Pinseldeckkraft) onto the layer to bring even more details into the image.

  9. 9

    Create 2 guides:

    - Image / Guides / New Guide in : Horizontal 38.
    - Image / Guides / New Guide in : Vertical 62.

  10. 10

    - New transparent layer.

    Select the “Pencil Tool” and paint straight lines along the guides using the Circle (5) brush.

    Set the layer mode to “Overlay” and the opacity to 65%.
    - View / Guides (deselect).

  11. 11

    - Create a new layer.
    - “Ellipse Select Tool”: Settings => “Fixed: Size” and enter “600×400”
    - Create the selection.
    - Select / Feather: 300px.
    - Press “D” to set the default colors black/white.
    - Hit Ctrl+"+" to fill the selection with black color.

  12. 12

    Use the “Rectangle Select Tool” to clip the left part of the circle.

    Move the cut selection to the vertical line.
    -Opacity: 80%.

  13. 13

    Now we have to bring in the “architectural style”. For this reason, I used an image from sxc.hu. I have already prepared the image (originally, the plans lay on a table and I have changed the perspective to make them even).

    - File / Open as Layers: “plans_blueprints.png”.

  14. 14

    Move the layer a bit to the right side. Choose a part you like and clip overlaying parts so that the plan parts are only visible in the right part (which is bounded by the shadow).

  15. 15

    - Set the plan’s layer mode to “Grain merge”.

  16. 16

    The next step is to narrow the middle part some more and thus create some focus.

    - Create a new layer
    - Select a thin part on the top and a think part on the bottom and fill the selection with black.

  17. 17

    - Create another new layer
    - Select 2 bands (stripes) again – new within the black bands and fill them with the color 555555.

  18. 18

    Now the text:

    - Write “001 ··· 002 ··· 003 ··· 004 ··· 005 ··· 006 ··· 007 ··· 008 ··· 009” with a fat font, size 55, black onto a layer.

    - In the Layers window, move the layer directly above the background layer with the texture. Opacity: 25%, layer mode: Divison.
    - Clone this text layer and reduce the font size. Opacity to 35%, layer mode to Overlay.

  19. 19

    - Write “Architectural” and “Dream” (black text color) onto 2 separate new layers and arrange the blocks like this:

  20. 20

    - Apply Filters / Enhance / Sharpen: 70 to the background layer. Now it’s finished!

  21. 21

    Here are some variants in other colors:

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This topic (Creating architect/grunge style wallpaper) was rated 5.0/5.0 in 1 votes out of 3 comments.

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Cadaver Cadaver member for about 1 year rated this topic with 5/5
about 1 year ago

Here's something i made based on a quite interesting game I've been playing for a while now. This was a great tutorial, as with all of this site's tutorials.

Karti
about 2 years ago

Many thanks, showed me a lot of great techniques :)

prairiekittin prairiekittin member for about 4 years
over 2 years ago

Changed a couple of things. Here is my result

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