e'll try to create a rusted plate here using one of my works to comment the different steps.

very start has an end and i usually hope it comes fast. Everything starts in gray, a gray base of the whole picture is created in several layers first. I tend to never merge layers. 

The amulet should fit in a dark fantasy themed world so the idea was to have it dark, old, weathered ...and bloody, blood in my fantasy art is like ketchup on the table, has to be always there.

So, we'll create the metal base for the amulet trying to achieve a realistic metal look with damage, scraps and bloodsplats.

I think there is not much to comment about the base itself, it has to contain all the shading and 'geometry' of the plate.
Create the circle in a middle gray and with dodge/burn set to around 17 create the shading. Btw, all my brushes are set to +20 hardness to avoid some blurness from the start on.

Something to keep in mind nonetheless is the fact that if the base with the shadows doesn't looks remotely realistic, the entire work never will do so. Some knowledge about how different materials reflect or split different colored lights is a big help.

If you're working with a symmetric object, duplicate the base layer with the main shadows, rotate it by 180° and set it to lighten or color dodge with around 50% transparency. 
Colore (under hue/saturation) the new layer to the desired color (red here) and erasethe top half which should have the standard light only.
That's the easy way, the right way would be to take the paintbrush at low opacity and paint the underlight.

Color dodge not 'screen' as usually standard. Dodge creates a harder light with brighter smaller spots in themost exposed area, good for metal or dramatic touch.

t this point, it's good to know how we want the metal to look exactly. The goal now is to make the plate look realistic and specially, to have it look the way WE want.This is the most important part. Before i go on with it, some (more or less) wise words...

It makes not much sense to try to find the perfect metal, concrete or brick texture, you'll seldom find it. Instead, use several textures overlayed, rip details where needed and do the rest by hand. It's all about forcing the textures to look the way I (and you) want to and not let them define the look. 
 

e clear about the object you're doing.On a small plate like this small scratches would look like deep large ones while on a bigger plate, everything would look smaller, this sounds terribly logic.

Of course, much easier here would be to take the paintbrush to make them, but that's like trying to paint stars. We always try to balance out the picture, which at the end, mostly looks handmade and so unrealistic.

This is a weakness the real world hasn't and we've got to take advantage of that.
Plus, the scraps in this texture have slight changes in deepnes and height that will look realistic later...

I modified the levels of the image until the scrapes were darker and the ground itself brighter (contrast! in one word), didn't made the scrapes  totally black though as any shading tones were welcome.

The blend of the layer was set to around 200 starting from white to get rid of the ground. I let some darker details of the ground stay and fixed lost dark pixels with the eraser.
Then duplicated the layer, merged both together and set the blend to 255 again.

Added an inner bevel to the texture with depth/blurr set both to 1.

You'll notice that the left side is quite empty, i have already started to erase most details there to get the amount of damage i want. The plate is not falling in pieces yet!

Also, after adding the damage i went back to the gray base and added hicks to the border of the plate (with the eraser) to fit with the position of the scraps on the border.

The bevel/emboss effect of the base did the rest of the effect.

The red ring is simply a layer on top in red with some red  outher glow.

 
As a final touch i added some blood splats on top of the plate, see the bloodsplats tutorial to see how i did them =]

he skull was sketched on paper separately since my skills and taste had changed in the past 8 years. The old one on the original sketch simply didn't made the cut anymore and inbetween, i had discovered W40k art and the power of using horns all over the place and evil looking stuff.

The sketch was scanned and separately shaded and colored in PS keeping in mind the light sources of the plate, but well, the skull is another story.

he weirdo ornament stuff around the skull on the plate was simply nicked off the original skull with a color layer on top.
I had reached the point were i had seen enough of the plate and wanted to see it done. I simply hoped the sizing down of the plate (the original was around 3000x3000) would blend the sketched dark ornament nicely with the rest, it partly worked.

Removed the blood on the final amulet since i had already some on the skull.

ork at twice the size the finished picture should have and size down when finished, this will blend all layers nicely together, use some unsharp mask to gain detail. 

Play a lot with the levels of a layer texture in Photoshop, you can add a lot of contrast (in structure, not necessarily color) or more strenght to details. 

Desature! When creating old objects desature the layers, weatheration desatures objects, paint and even rust. 

Old rust is dark and desatured, new rust has stronger orange. 

Don't feed your cat with nails. 

Back to the tutorials main page.
Back to StrangeFate's site.

Don't link directly to this page, don't rip anything from here.
Alu.jpg - streak.jpg - rusty.jpg - ground.jpg are free textures available on the net, the rest is self sourced and (c) Mario Vazquez