Recently, I've made some artwork with some grunge and faded looks and some people have asked me how I did it. My answer is that I used the plasma clouds rendering filter in Gimp to do most of it. I was surprised that many people do not think to use procedural or rendering tools inside the masks themselves for layers to get some neat effects. It is really easy, so here is a quick how-to on making anything you could possible want appear grungy or faded. First off, here is an example piece of art I did that uses a ton of it:

Let's start with a basic image of a couple circles I drew. Boring right? Yes, so let's make them look dingy! Here's my fantastic circles:

What I am going to do is duplicate a few layers of the circles and make them slightly different colors. This will help give you some different layers and colors to play with how you want things to look. Create a layer mask for the first layer you want to do. With the layer mask selected, navigate to Filters - Render - Clouds - Plasma. You will get a dialog box:

In the dialog, you can adjust the Random Seed and Turbulence. Sliding turbulence to the left smooths out your result where sliding to the right will make things much more rougher. Slide it around to the look you want to achieve. You can click the New Seed button to re-randomize the filter's output to give you different looking clouds. Click Ok when done:

We now have our layer mask a greyscale plasma cloud generated in it. What is going on is the black areas in the mask are transparent and the white areas are not, so the mask with the plasma cloud in it is giving your layer a very rough appearance by showing some here and hiding some there. Let's do it again to another layer of our blue circles, this time a slightly different blue color so some of the different blue shows through:

Here is how your layers will appear, notice the plasma cloud outputs in the layer masks:

Lets add a layer mask with a plasma cloud in it to the background as well! That will spice things up a little bit:

There are many other rendering and cloud filters besides plasma, but I think it's my favorite to quickly do things like this. Photoshop has very similar plugin filters, but once again I have chosen Gimp to do this... I will leave you with another piece of art where you can see how heavily I used layers of things with plasma clouded masks:

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