I was asked how I went along making freak, or at least
the lower part of the series. The yellow/orangie area. So here we
go again.
First off, doing grunge artwork is a world of its
own...you can break rules, be yourself and go to the limit (at least
thats what I do). So dont hesitate to experiment.
The first thing (if you dont already have it) is
making a stock gallery, with photos you have taken. It doesnt
really matter if the photo is arty or not, just put them all in
there. Even you screw up a photo or you think its bad, place it
into your stock gallery, a bad photo can always be used in grunge
pieces.
Related this back to Freak!, I took a couple of photos of myself(eye,
skin etc.) and friends. Furthermore I took photos with very high
shutterspeeds, big aperture and a pretty high ISO factor. You
move the camera around a bit, (maybe use a candle/ computer screen,
lamps etc) or something similar which will create hotspots. As
I was focusing on the individual in Freak!, I pointed the camera
on my face for a milisecond to get a skin color like background
color in there as well.Following is an unedited photo.
Other things included simple taking a photo of you(friend, someone)
moving around, or just take a photo moving your hand. Which brings
our another interesting effect.

As said at the beginning of the tutorial, you really have to
experiment, and push yourself to the limits.
Here is another shoot, which turned out quite nice (unedited)
So far we have 3 interesting shoots, (again dont worry if the
photo doesnt look "great", you might be able to incorparate
it, into one of your designs)
Taking this thing a bit further now. Lets overlay photo2 and
photo3 and apply various "layer" effects to them. In
most cases this gives a very nice touch to grunge pieces.


In the 2nd piece I did a Motion Blur (Angle=0°) otherwise
there would have been to much going on.
So far so good...we have a decent background already, you can
always spice them up more with adding other photos or parts of
photos on top, and adding foreground layers, with "grunge
borders".
Grunge Borders could be another whole tutorial own its own, but
simple put best results can be achieved with a set of nice brushes,
stock photography (black/white - very low brightness and very
high contrast).
In the end you can come up with something like the following
(piece of Freak!).
Always remember even when going crazy, convay a message...random
splashering around etc. might be nice, but for public pieces...sent
out a message :P (even if its unclear :))
