Starcraft 2 wallpaper design

This tutorial will teach you how to create Starcraft theme wallpaper.

Step 1

First we need to find some textures and Starcraft font. I use 2 images from SXC:
Rusted metal texture and Texture for metal tiles

Starcraft font can be downloaded from Dafont.com (you need to install it before running Photoshop).

Step 2

Create a new document. I start with 1600×1200 which can be resized to a smaller resolution later.

Open rusted metal texture and resize it until you like its appearance. I resized the original image to 1900×1577.

We are going to bring some order in texture pattern so it will look more impressive.
Copy resized image to your document and place it with 200px blank space to the right. We need only a half of an image, the other half will be mirrored.
Select and clear everything to the left from the horizontal center. You will get something like this:

Step 3

Duplicate the layer with your texture, mirror it (Edit – Transform – Flip Horizontal) and place in the blank space which we left on the right side. Merge down this layer by pressing Ctrl+E.

Step 4

Press Ctrl+U to adjust color and lightness. Here’s my settings:

Step 5

Mirror image to the left and merge layers so you will have the complete texture.

Step 6

Create new layer and fill it with gradient like this:

Step 7

Set Layer Blending mode to Overlay and reduce opacity about 50%. At this step I additionally reduced lightness of the layer with texture to -22 (Ctrl+U).

Step 8

Now we will make a dark area in the center. Select Lasso tool with Feather set to 5. Make free selection at the rust texture image, copy it to your document, then mirror and center.
Set layer blending mode to Multiply and reduce opacity to 60%.

Step 9

It’s time to paint some rust. Set brush color to brownish orange (I used #40230C) and Blending Mode to Color.
Select one of the standard Spatter brushes and adjust brush scattering to imitate the natural spreading of rust.
Now paint some orange stains right over the metal texture. To make it look more natural, you can change brush opacity and size while painting.
Here are my brush settings and the resulting image:

Step 10

Select Horizontal Type Tool and write your text. I used 36 pt for big letters and 24 pt for small.
I made some tracking changes to make the text look better (tracking is the distance between the letters in the Character palette).
Tracking between S-t and C-r is set to -200, f-t 50 and 0 for others.
Now rasterize text layer, select small letters with Polygonal Lasso Tool and lift them a little.

Step 11

Double click on the text layer to open the Layer Style window. We are going to make the text look like following.
Change layer blending options according to the pictures.

Step 12

Select Pen tool and draw a shape like on the picture below. Instead of this you can just type “1″ with Starcraft font but I don’t like how it looks.

Step 13

Copy and mirror your “1″ to get “II”. Merge the layers with “1″ and place the resulting layer beneath the text layer. Copy layer style from the text layer and paste it to the layer with “II”.

Step 14

Double click on the “II” layer to open Layer Style window. Uncheck “Drop Shadow”, add “Outer Glow” and make changes to the other effects like on the picture below.

Step 15

Create a new layer. Duplicate the “II” layer by pressing Ctrl+J and merge it with the empty layer to rasterize all effects. Place the resulting layer below the “II” layer and add some blur (Filter – Blur – Gaussian Blur…) to create glowing effect.

Step 16

We are going to add some orange reflection like on the letters. Create new layer above “II”, select soft round brush and set it’s opacity to 30% and color to light orange (mine was #F8CA9D) and make a few strokes at the top of each “I”. Also you can add some white strokes over the orange to make it look more glittering.

Step 17

Make a new layer. Ctrl+click on the “II” layer to select all its objects. Go to Edit – Stroke. Set Width to 5 px, Color to white, Location to Inside and press “OK”.
To make the same thing with the inner edges, select Pen tool and draw a path going along the center edge of each “I”. Then use “Stroke path with brush” option on the Paths palette (don’t forget to change brush to hard round 5px white).

Step 18

Select Pen tool and draw a path for the bottom leaf of the gate. Hold Shift when you need to create straight line.

Step 19

Stroke this path with hard round brush 13 px dark blue (#283547). Apply layer style like it is shown on the picture below. Then duplicate this layer, choose Edit – Transform – Flip Vertical and move it upwards to create the top leaf of the gate.
In Bevel and Emboss set Shading Angle to -90 for this layer. It’s needed because the light goes from the center of the image.

Step 20

Make a selection like this. There are many ways to do it: with quick mask, Pen tool or Polygonal lasso tool. I used Pen tool.
At the Channels palette, click “Save selection as channel”. New alpha channel called “Alpha 1″ will be created.

Step 21

Create new layer and fill it with the original rust metal texture. Now go to Channels palette, Ctrl+click on our new channel to load the selection and then press delete key to clear it.
In this way we get the form of our gates filled with metal texture

Step 22

Press “Ctrl+U” and adjust the color. Add a little shadow using Drop shadow in Layer Blending Options menu (distance 5 px, size 10 px).

Step 23

Open the Tiles texture and press Shift+Ctrl+U to desaturate it.
Create new layer in our wallpaper document and fill it with this texture. Delete the unneeded part like we did in the previous step using the alpha channel.