Graffiti Application
Sometimes it’s the little things that make an urban image come together and graffiti is one of them. By adding a few tags and stencils to an otherwise pristine concrete wall, you can easily take a piece from good to great in not time flat and if you really want to go big, work in an entire mural. For this tutorial, I’ll be using Adobe Photoshop CS3, though you can achieve the same results in pretty much any image editor that supports layers and some semblance of blend modes.
Step 1 - The Source Image: To start with, you need to create an image that contains a hard surface where graffiti might make an appearance. A building, a retaining wall, a fence, etc. If you don’t have one at the ready, you can use the one I created for this tutorial - click here to download it along with the other assets used in this tutorial.
Step 2 - The Graffiti: If you live anywhere near people, there is going to be graffiti. Most of it is just garbage and quite worthless, though some of it is truly amazing art. Take a walk with your digital camera and find some good graffiti material to use, or search around online to find exactly what you’re after. A couple graffiti options are included in the tutorial source files download.
Step 3 - Getting to Work: For this exercise, we are going to work with a light colored, concrete wall. I’ll touch on working with dark colors towards the end, so don’t worry. In Photoshop, open the base image and the black and white graffiti tag. Drag the graffiti into the base image and it automatically creates a new layer. Since the tag we are using is a nice, high contrast image, simply changing the blend mode to multiply will hide the white pixels.
Step 4 - The Blend: The tag is now placed over the wall and not looking too bad, though the edges of the post need to go. You could use the magic wand tool to select the area around the tag and delete it, though that’s your last option with something like this. A much better way to go involves setting the white point. From the Image Menu, choose Adjustments> Levels and click the white eyedropper icon. Now click the fringe areas of the concrete post to set the white point of the graffiti. With a soft eraser, clean up the edges a bit and your tag is now sitting pretty on the wall nicely.
Step 5 - A Little Fade: To really make the tag look like it’s on the wall, it’s best to fade the art a little bit. Change the opacity to your liking. This is typically dependent on the lighting and atmosphere of the image you’re integrating the tag into, so in this case, I set mine to 70%.
And that’s it. You’ve just vandalized an otherwise pristine wall. You can repeat this treatment again with more graffiti elements and really get a nice, urban feel going with very little effort. You can do this same set of steps over a dark wall by simply inverting the colors of the tag, dragging it over your dark wall and setting the blend mode to screen. This will yield a white tag over a dark wall as shown bellow. You can also play with color art and the more advanced blend modes to add some cool, colorful interest to your images.
