N. Grunge and Gore and Scuffs

Step 16: N. Grunge and Gore and Scuffs

N. Grunge and Gore and Scuffs
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This will be two steps, an overall toner, and then the blood.

(image 1 - grunge toner from oil tank)

1. The gun needed some roughing up and slight colour toning.
2. Using the same oil tank grunge source from the graffiti section
3. desaturation of the source, then set the layer to "overlay" it on the gun itself so everything is covered (in a few sections if need be). If you merged the entire gun previously you can just magic wand the outline and create a mask for the grunge. Be careful, overlay disappears on white, so if you add a background later it will show up. Make sure you mask the entire gun well.
4. erase the sections of white highlights, dark shadows, tone the body and handle as needed to make it look like all one material.

Okay, it's dirty, but what do you use now for blood? Well with a close range weapon, we will get splatter. Blood isn't really red, it has kind of a dark brown hue to it and it dries dark so we will do this in a colour and a toner layer (most things I colour will have those two layers, one for colour, one for shade.)

(image 2 - tar truck spashes closeup for blood)

1. the source was from a series I took walking past a construction site. They were tarring the roof and the big cart that heats the tar was on the sidewalk. Yes you may have to explain to the workers why "some crazy guy is drooling over taking pictures of NOTHING" but it helps to have a business card with you to show them why. I took about 50 images of the cart from various angles. I used this one.
2. This is the easy part. Magic Wand 25px on the black. Done. Crazy eh?
3. Colouring black and white is difficult unless you know the "colourize" checkbox in the hue-saturation pop-up dialogue box. When checked it defaults to red, and with a little more saturation you are done colouring.
4. A nice muddy red brown. I rotated the image a bit so the splatters spray back from the electrode direction. We want it to look like our character is zapping the zombies right up close!
5. duplicate the blood spatter and link them. put them over the gun (in sections if need be). Mask the perimeter. Set both layers to "overlay". Erase the top layer of spatter where it is supposed to be a highlight and burn it a bit with the shadows. A few smudges and tweaks and the blood is done.
I would then go over all the highlights and shadows (using a rough spatter brush and being bold helps) and fill any holes or add small elements you need and you can take a bow.

(image 3 - gun final)

Congratulations, you are off to save humanity in the ongoing undead war.

Remember anyone can make a picture, but if you can tell a STORY, you are a real artist.