Hello everyone this is Chris from Spoon Graphics
back with another video tutorial for Adobe Photoshop.
Today we're going to have some fun creating a surreal art style known as Grime Art, which
is a weird trend where portrait photos are doodled upon with drooping, cartoonish drips
of slimy flesh in vibrant colours to produce weird and wonderful zombie-like images with
a gross, but somehow cool effect.
I'll show you a handy technique within Photoshop that allows you to easily illustrate and colour
your artwork with the help of a pen tablet.
Check out
my showcase of Grime Art illustrations over on Spoon Graphics for some inspiration of
the kinds of weird and wonderful images that are made in this style.
I'll be zombie-fying this free portrait photo from Unsplash.com, by tracing the facial area
and adding loads of slimy drips. I've chosen a bright blue and pink for my artwork, then
the addition of some basic highlights and shadows help to enhance the illustration.
Open up your chosen photograph in Adobe Photoshop. Create a new layer to add the doodles.
Select the Brush tool, then select a basic round tip and increase the Hardness to 100%.
Within the Brush Settings panel, activate the Shape Dynamics feature and set the Control
to Pen Pressure, assuming you have a Pen Tablet. Similar effects can be created by illustrating
with a mouse, but with the Fade option instead.
Enable Smoothing, which will allow you to set a value in the top toolbar. I find 50%
is a good value to keep the line true to where I'm drawing while ironing out any unwanted
kinks or wobbles.
Use the square bracket keys to alter the size of the brush. 20px is appropriate for the
scaling of this image.
Begin tracing an outline of the face, but with the addition of some drip features.
Moderating the pressure on your tablet when you start and end a stroke helps to achieve
the classic tapered look.
Trace around the eyebrows and the eyes.
Grime art is very much a doodling art style, where not much care is taken to achieve realism,
so don't worry too much about the quality of your line work.
Zombie-like eyes are a common theme in Grime Art. Add details to give the eye sockets a
decayed appearance.
Trace the main facial features, including the nose and mouth by following the main shapes
and lines from the photograph.
The stand-out feature of Grime Art is the array of dripping flesh, which is created
by simply drawing loads of drooping shapes to fill the facial area.
Randomise the shape and size of each drip. The more you add, the more detailed the final
result will be.
Small lines and circular bumps are additional elements that can be drawn to fill in any
gaps and to add extra detail.
Continue drawing slimy drips throughout the face area.
To fill in any areas which should be black, such as the eyebrows, reduce the smoothing
value of the brush to zero.
Any other colours should be added on a new layer so you don't paint over the black outlines.
Add this layer above the Background, but underneath the lines layer.
Choose a colour for the features of your Grime Art victim. I'm using a bright pink for the
eyes and lips.
Paint in these areas, taking care to keep the brush strokes within the width of the
black outline.
Don't forget to fill in the eyes with either white or black.
It helps to add any additional colours that might accidentally be painted over existing
areas on a new layer.
You can either carefully paint around the edges, make a selection and fill the area,
or roughly paint the outline then erase any overlap.
I find it's natural to flip my Wacom pen around to use the virtual eraser to clean up the
edges.
The Grime Art effect is taking shape, but some simple shading can really boost the illustration
style.
Add a new layer above the colour fills, but below the linework layer.
Reset the foreground and background colours to black and white.
Paint in a shaded area, such as around the eye socket. Change the blending mode of this
layer to Soft Light, which will automatically generate darker or lighter shades of the underlying
colour for easy shadows and highlights.
Fill in the main areas where a shadow would appear loosly following the black outlines.
Once the main shading has been added, giving each of the drips a little shading really
helps add depth to the artwork. Use a small tip and follow the black stroke, beginning
and ending with the brush concealed, but extending out to add a slither of colour underneath
the shape.
When all the shadows have been adding, press the X key to swap the brush colour to white.
Using the same technique, add a series of highlights on top of each drip shape.
How much care and attention you pay to the quality of your illustration is entirely up
to you. Some Grime Art pieces are well polished with clean lines, whereas other have much
more of a hand-drawn doodle style.
The final result is a surreal, zombie-like cartoon effect that makes little sense, but
is the kind of underground art syle that is popular in some corners of the Internet.
So if you enjoyed this tutorial or learnt any new tricks be sure to give the video a
Like to help spread the word. Subscribe to the channel to stick around for more of my
content, and head over to my Spoon Graphics website to download my free design resources.
As always thank you very much for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.