Mixed Media Beginners: Gritty & Grungy

Hi there! It’s been a while since I set out intentionally to make a Mixed Media Beginners page and this time I’m bringing back the Grunge look. It’s not quite the Teen Spirit look of the ’90’s but grungey art definitely has certain characteristics. Today will use several brushes and methods.

What is Grunge Style in art? This is a rejection of clean, crisp and refined; it’s more about worn and distressed and industrial but doesn’t have to be depressing. It is also perfectly suited to mixed media. Think:

muted or ‘dirty’ colours (no pastels, or clean ‘pretty’ patterns) leading to a darker overall colour scheme,
crooked or uneven lines or angles, (items like alphas or multiple photos not lined up so it looks casually thrown together and imperfect),
‘faded poster left in the rain’ weathered style graphics so they have a mottled or aged look,
worn or gritty textures with an urban or industrial architectural vibe – think man-made material ‘patterns’ like brick or concrete or ripped denims;
drippy, chipped, smeared or splattered paint, with or without a graffiti aesthetic, or ‘burnt’ or scratchy stamping effects like coffee rings, used to erase or distress patterns.
Elements could include faded or yellowed washi tape; metals and imperfect creased papers and torn photos and having these at an angle rather than perfectly straight. It’s not a style you’d find a lot of flowers, glitter or ribbons on though. More like police/ caution tape and chain link fence pieces.
Keyword searches for products in the store apart from ‘grunge’ could include: aged, worn, torn, gritty, faded, weathered and distressed. Some ‘vintage’ products might work too just avoid the floral tea sets and lace doilys.

The good news is that the store has various grungey products to achieve this look if you like it. Overlays for papers to give them a more instant grunge look as well as drippy and splattery paints and transfers for a more custom background, and stenciled alphas are good ways to stretch your basic muted paper stash and make it more grunge. Paula Kesselring has a long line of Grunge titled products and I’m using a few today but several designers in the store make products that suit this theme.

Enough talk for now. Let me put some street art photos into a template and I’ll talk as I scrap.

Here are the products I’m starting with.

I picked this Simple Life 9 template because it has room for that yellowed tape, the angled cut of the paper mats are ‘imperfect’, the cut outs on the yellow paper are reminiscent of dashed lines in the middle of a road & it has some doodley lines that meet the messy style characteristic. I may angle the taped photo to make it more grunge but it has grungey bones. Next I pulled alphas to give a street vibe. I liked the NBK PolkaDot Boldness alpha and Paula’s stenciled Grunge Ink 2 alpha look to mix up my title and I angled most of them so they were misaligned and left room around them for messy paint to add to the look later.

Because of the colours in my photos on the right, I chose a contrasting paper pack to go with it. The Bleached 2 pack is just black and white and the textures were a deciding factor in this. Because of the urban grunge, I thought some pops of muted red and blues from A Whimsical Adventures’s Mixed Media No.10 paper pack would work well with it.

Above, I started with a Mixed Media paper as the main background and the Bleached in the red cut supporting role but then ended up switching them (and angling my supporting photos) as shown below.

I felt like this not only looked like it fit the ‘left out in the rain’, drippy look but also tried to line up some of the darker areas with parts of my photo so they looked like they extended into the background page, and also with the Mixed Media 10 paper, like the concept of leading lines in photography, leading the eye into the connected parts of the page and alluding to the tops of the palm trees in the quarter circle journal area.

I added a bit more colour with the Mixed Media 10 Papers clipped to the other paper pieces in the template (the texture on them is really amazing! On the blue quarter circle piece below you can see the peeling paint effect and this kind of texture adds so much without much work!) and then decided rather than masking my larger photo to make it look like it was bleeding into the background a bit (like we often do in mixed media with the out of frame technique), that I’d go with the ‘left in the rain and dripping colour’ look and just used a basic brush to follow some of the darker patches on the Bleached background around the bottom corner of the photo, selecting a green that works with the grass colour. This is quite forgiving and so is grunge really, so I am the first to admit my brushwork as you can see in the Layer 5 thumbnail is terrible, but changing the blend mode of the Layer in the Layers Palette to Color and 100% still gives the effect I was after.

Getting grungy with brushes: Wanting a bit more colour I grabbed more mixed media from Paula’s Grunge Collection Brushes 26, it has an abr file to load the brushes in Photoshop or PSE as well as the PNG files you can use in any graphics program.

Sometimes I will just clip my preferred colour or a paper to the PNG of the splat (in this case the yellowy cream), or use the fx/Layer Style on Color Overlay but that gives a more ‘floating above the paper look’ like in the journal spot. Sometimes I want it to show the paper texture more like behind the start of the Halftone Polka alpha title. You can see from the Layers Palette that both of those splats are the same yellowy colour but the visual effect you can achieve with another technique is quite different.

My process for using a PNG of a splat to give it more of an ‘absorbed into the textured paper’ look when I can’t or don’t want to load a whole abr brush pack is to:

drag the PNG of the brush in on a layer above the paper (I’m using PaulaKesselring_GrungeCollectionBrushes26_1 ),
decide the colour, roughly, that I want it to be,
ctrl click the PNG layer and then copy and paste that onto a new layer (in my example above the copy and pasted shape is called Layer 8, it was the same in everyway as the layer below it before the next few steps);
with the new layer as the active layer, I ctrl click the thumbnail on the layers palette to get marching ants around the perimeter of the splat shape and then go to ‘edit > fill’ and select ‘color’ – I use the colour picker/ eye dropper to chose the colour I already decided on and it then fills the shape,
I then change the blend mode of that coloured splat layer to Overlay and reduce the opacity a bit depending on the intensity of colour versus texture that I want (so in the previous screenshot that was Layer 8 at 78%).

At this point I felt like I needed to bring some of the yellow and red from the photos into the page so I went with a more muted tone and used some of the drippy spray paint PNG’s in Paula’s Graffiti Alpha 2 pack but left them more solid with the fx ColorOverlay method.

I liked the doodley lines from the template but decided to cut them up and move them around to bring the ‘mess’ into different areas of the page and loosely frame it. (Tip: ‘stroke’ them in the fx panel to be more obvious temporarily so they were easier to see and ‘grab’ and move with your mouse). Ialso added a metallic sheen to the NBK Polka Boldness Alpha with a Mommyish Layer Style I already had loaded (a grey paint style from Memory Pockets Monthly: Document )

And finally, it wouldn’t be a Mixed Media process if I didn’t change my mind on the papers and switch some (or all) out at the very end. It was feeling too dark so I went back to my Paula’s papers stash to find some ‘imperfect whites’ to clip to the smaller photo mats, I found the mottled whites in her Paper Pack 5 and used the krafty creased tan over the red washi tape in the template), as well as this cool sandy concrete paper in her Earthy Tones Paper Pack and switched out the background as well as switching the wonky cut matt for one with more red from AWA’s Mixed Media 10 paper pack.

This happens mostly when I scrap over a few days or sessions, sometimes coming back to the computer, maybe in a different light or different time of the day, I see things differently and have other ideas so whereas dark felt right before, all of sudden it was too much and grunge doesn’t have to be that extreme of dark.

So here’s the final, newer, brighter but grittier version – the textures in that collaged Mixed Media 10 paper pack look great against the concrete and the texture in the NBK alpha title from the Mommyish paint style pops as well. Even the terrible brush work on Layer 5 to bleed some of the green grass out onto the Bleached paper back near the start of this process still looks fine. I think I like how forgiving the grunge style can be!