In this tutorial, we’ll make a widescreen wallpaper.  The key to making wallpapers is to start out with a large widescreen canvas, the larger, the better.  The reason for that is you can always resize the image down to target smaller widescreen resolutions, and crop the image for standard aspect ratios.  In this particular wallpaper, we’re going to make rust seep through old, cracked concrete.  This is a style you’ll see used a lot in grunge and goth style pieces.  Here’s the end result we’ll be shooting for:

Now to start out we’ll need two images.  One will be our concrete sheet, and the other, the rust that lies behind.

Now what I’ve done is duplicated the concrete image onto the rust image, so now the rust image is completely hidden from me.  The goal here will be to make the cracks and the holes look natural in the concrete sheet, which will reveal the underlying rust image.  To that end, I’ll use the eraser tool and choose a brush with a rough edge to gradual erase small areas of the concrete layer.  You’ll notice that in my example, I’ve followed the natural cracks that are already present in the concrete.  I’m also going to extend the area deleted across the whole width of our wallpaper, in order to give the rust a prevalent part of our piece.

When we are finished erasing our concrete, let’s right click on the layer and choose blending options.  We’ll first want to add a drop shadow, to give the image a three dimensional look  The stock settings for the drop shadow should work fine unless you’ve got additional light sources you need to match.  In our case, you’ll notice that the buttons/heads of the bolts in the concrete have their shadows facing the same direction as the default drop shadow, so it should work perfectly for us.

Now just to highlight the area around the cracks a bit more, I’m going to use an outer and inner glow, with the blending mode set to normal, and the color set to a dark grey.  All the other settings will be left at their default values.  This helps the cracks stand out a bit and also hides some of the rough aspects of this technique.

Well there we have it.  A very simple technique that can be applied to many other things, not just wallpapers.  The end result takes just moments, and looks aesthetically appealing.