Grunge Brush Tutorial for GIMP

One tool graphic artists find useful is the brush tool. This is because it can be used to apply various effects to an image with little effort, as well as save on the time it would normally take to apply such an effect otherwise.

This simple tutorial will explain how to make a grunge brush in GIMP.

You will need GIMP installed of course, which you can download here. It will also help if you have some experience with using GIMP, though this tutorial should be fairly simple to follow.

Starting off

Create a new image of any size, though I have decided to make mine 300px by 300px. I will assume this is simple enough not to require a screen shot.

Creating your basic shape

Activate the tool for creating hand drawn regions. You can do this by pressing the F key on your keyboard or by clicking on this icon  Now create a random selection using this tool.

Altering your selection

On the bottom left side of your window next to your scroll bar, you should have a button to toggle the quick mask like so  Click on this to apply a quick mask.

You should now have something like this.

Adding texture to your shape

Go to Filters -> Noise -> Pick then enter these settings like so.

You should now have something like this.

Finishing

Now we want to remove the quick mask, so click on this button on the bottom left area of your screen  (same button you pressed to apply the quick mask).

You should now have some marching ants around the edges of the shape you had after you applied the noise pick filter to it. Fill this selection with black and then you are done!

What you have now should look something like this.

Now might be a good time to autocrop your image (go to Image -> Autocrop).

Installing your brush

To make your brush ready for use, simply flatten your image (Image -> Flatten Image), then convert to greyscale (Image -> Mode -> Greyscale).

The easiest way of installing your brush, is probably to select from the menu Script-Fu -> Selection -> To Brush.

Another way of doing it, is to locate your GIMP brushes folder then save your brush here. For more information, try the help forum.