1. New Document

First of all, as usual, create a new document in Photoshop. This is up to you, do you want a very large brush that you can size down every time you want to use it? Or do you want a brush around 200 pixels in size so that it’s ready for use whenever you want to use it in a small document. It’s probably best to use a very large document size for this tutorial, but I’ll just use a small size for the sake of learning.

2. Initial Brushing

Get out one of the standard soft brushes that come with Photoshop. Size it up to whatever size you would like it, then brush a few blobs onto the background.

These are the settings I’ve got:

This is what my random brushing looks like:

Now merge all of your layers together, so that you only have one layer.

3. Apply Texture

The next thing we need to do is apply some sort of texture to the brush. Start by finding a good texture on the internet. For this tutorial I’ve used this dirt texture that I took a few months ago.

Open up your texture and save it as a PSD file onto your desktop.

Now back to your brushing document. Be sure your layers are merged together, then go to Filter > Distort > Displace, using the settings shown below, or similar.

After you press OK (shown in the top right of the above screenshot) you’ll be asked to choose a PSD file, this is used to displace the current document. Choose the PSD that you earlier saved to your desktop.

Looks pretty decent in my opinion, but be sure you mess around with different settings and textures.

4. Finishing Off

To finish this off, get another grunge brush either you made or someone else, and brush a little bit over the edges with white as your foreground color.

You may also want to apply Filter > Sharpen > Sharpen to your brush layer, to give it a little more detail. Remember to get creative, remember to try different textures, filters, layer modes, etc.

After you’re finished with making the brush, select the canvas (ctrl+a) then in your Photoshop menus, go to Edit > Define Brush, then it will show up in your brushes. This is a grungy image I came up with using the brushes that I made using this tutorial:

Thank you all for reading this Photoshop tutorial, I hope you learned something!

This short Photoshop tutorial will show you an easy and effective way of making colour palettes.

1. Document Creation

Let’s start by making a new document in Photoshop. You can use whatever size you want, something fairly small though, preferably. I used a document size of 210 x 360 pixels.

Leave your background color as white (#ffffff).

2. Base Squares

In your new document make a bunch of random-colored squares. For this you can use the rectangular marquee tool. Make a selection, color it, move the selection and color it again. Try to use as many different colors here as possible.

I made each of my squares 40 x 40 pixels in size.

3. Colorize

In your layers window, add a solid color layer by clicking the create new fill or adjustment layer button, then choosing solid color from the drop down menu.

After you’ve done this, choose any old color for the Solid Color adjustment layer.

4. Settings

Lower the opacity for the color layer to 80%, then change the layer mode to Color.

Since I used a pinkish color I’m left with this palette:

Now you have a very cool colour palette that you can use in your design that will work well together. Save your images as .gif images and open them up any time you need a nice colour palette.

Credit to Mash11 from deviantART.