In this post we’re going to learn how to set up your brushes in Photoshop to make quick and easy grunge backgrounds.

I’ve had a few questions on ways to use Photoshop brushes, particularly the grunge brushes. While this may be common knowledge to experienced users, this post is aimed at new users and maybe give a different perspective of the brush palette to the more experienced users.

Start by setting your foreground and background colors to the main hues that you’d like your background to represent. Next, select a detailed, high res grunge brush. If you need a good brush you can download my set here or check out the many free brushes somewhere like Brusheezy.

Once you have your brush selected set up your brush palette as shown below. We’ll start with the Shape Dynamics. We’re really only concerned with the Angle here, this will assure that your brush has some variety too it.

Next is the Scattering, pretty self explanatory. Here we’re making sure the brush isn’t clumped together leaving big spots.

Now your Dual brush, here you’ll want to select another grunge brush of similar size.

To end we’ll set up the Color options, this is where you can play a little bit. You’re main concerns are the saturation and hue. This will give you the variance in color depending on what your looking for.

That’s it, we’re done setting everything up. All you need to do now is make a few quick swipes over your canvas and within seconds you’ll have a unique grunge background.

Click below to see what I ended with.