How to create murals/graffiti for your game in Photoshop?
In this tutorial, I’ll show you one of the methods that I use to create murals/graffiti for my projects. If you need a bunch of murals/graffiti in your projects, and since the image cleaning process can get a little bit tedious and time-consuming, you can find such materials, in addition to music packs, material functions, etc., on my Patreon page. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, we can begin.
Things You Need Before We Begin
- A high-quality image that’s either public domain or CC licensed.
- A wall image that’s again either public domain or CC licensed.
Creating Murals/Graffiti in Photoshop
We’ll start by importing our image into Photoshop, cleaning everything around our subject that we don’t want or need. After this process, we can bring in our wall texture and place it underneath our subject layer. The next step we should take is creating a new “Threshold” adjustment layer.
When you create a new adjustment layer, Photoshop will ask you if you want to use clipping. In this case, ensure that you tick the “Use Previous Layer to Create Clipping Mask” option, as shown in the next image.
You can adjust the threshold as you wish, or leave it as it is.
The next step is, if your image is too dark at some parts, you can select the “Dodge” tool, set its color value to something grey, and start painting over the areas that you want to brighten.
Next, we will set our subject layer’s blending mode to “Multiply”.
Doing so can result in losing some details. To bring those details back, while still in the dodge tool mode, we can hold the “Alt” key (which activates the “Burn” tool/brush) and paint over the areas that we want to bring back.
If you want to colorize your mural/graffiti, you can add a new “Hue/Saturation” adjustment layer: (Ensure that it is stacked at the top of every layer so it works as intended):
Again, don’t forget to check the “Use Previous Layer to Create Clipping Mask” option.
Enable the “Colorize” option by checking the box found on the right side of the screen. Pay attention to the layer stack one more time, adjust your brightness/saturation and color values according to your taste.
To make the graffiti even rougher, we can double-click on our subject layer to open the “Layer Style” options, where we can access the blending options.
Adjust the underlying layer strength according to your taste.
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After you are done, merge all of the layers together and start cleaning up your subject layer once again until there is only the subject left on the screen. And finally, since graffiti is not so sharp in real life, we can apply a “Gaussian Blur” filter with a value of 1px, or in some cases something between 0.5 to 1.
Bonus Tip: You can also trace lines in Illustrator automatically if you’d like to have a line art effect, bring that image into Photoshop and then follow the same steps to have more variations.