Grunge Brushes

by: MissTiina
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In this article I will show you the easiest way to create grunge brushes from photos! All you will need is any photo of a wooden frame.. many can be found on free stock photo sites like stock.xchng.

You can choose any one you want but for this lesson I will use this one by Christophe Libert a.k.a. mordoc.

This tutorial is written for Illustrator CS3, you will also need Photoshop to complete it. If you do not know how to create custom brushes in Photoshop please stay tuned as I will be adding that tutorial soon! 

In Illustrator locate and open your frame. You may wish to scale it down before you begin. I have scaled mine down about 40%. To scale, click on the black pointer tool and hold shift down as you drag a corner in.

Now that you have the image at a more smaller workable size, making sure the image is still selected with the pointer tool, choose the Object menu and go down to Live Trace / Tracing Options.

A box will pop up and should automatically default to black and white with a threshold of 128. This setting may be fine for this image, but not always will it be the look you wish for, play with the slider to acheive the 'grunginess'  you desire. Clicking the check box for Preview will show you the look you will get as you move the slider. Once you have it looking the way you want, click Trace.

Now that our frame is traced, we need to expand it to allow us to select and move certain sections. Click the Expand button in the top menu bar.

Now our frame is expanded and you can see all the sections here...  

By clicking the White pointer tool, you can select peices of the traced image and move them around... You may want to delete parts or just move them to easier extract them later.

I have moved my frame into 3 sections that I think will look neat as grungy brushes...

Now to export our finished grungy peices out of Illustrator and into Photoshop so we can make them into brushes! Click on File / Export... A dialog box will pop up and ask you to choose a filename and a file type... Choose .PSD.

If the settings are different then shown below, choose 300dpi and write layers. Hit OK and you are ready to open up your saved .PSD in Photoshop to create your brushes! 

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