Hey, you know when you see some pretty images on architecture sites or brochures and you just wonder like hey I wish I’d know how to do that? And sometimes that image is way easier to make than what it really looks like.
We have an amazing tutorial, and at the beginning, you are going to be like for real I’ll learn how to do that? and in the end, you’ll be happy you stayed. So look how we just use photoshop and a cad to make these awesome facade drawings.
In this tutorial, you’ll be learning how to make these beautiful facade drawings in photoshop only using a grunge texture and a cad drawing. Yes! only that 😮
Import your cad drawing into Photoshop. Here we used this file that has multiple facades, we will choose the above one for this tutorial.
If you have a library of textures on your computer just drag and drop it, if you don’t just download one from the internet.
Once you have your texture, drag it to photoshop and place it on top of your cad drawing.
You can scale it if it’s necessary, depending on the cad drawing, well and of course your decision on where exactly you want that texture.
In the layer panel on the right side of your photoshop, you will hide the grunge layer. And standing on the cad drawing layer, you will use the lasso tool to select the building in the cad drawing.
In the layer panel, now click on the eye icon to show the grunge layer again, and you will see the grunge texture and the selection of the building you just made.
Now to erase everything outside your selection, standing on the grunge layer you will use shortcut ctrl + I and then press erase key.
Now you are thinking but what about the other details on the building? Again, hide the grunge texture so you can see your cad drawing, and in this case for the windows, you will choose the magic wand and you will select the windows.
In the layer panel, click on the eye icon to make your grunge texture visible, and you will be able to see the texture and your selection of the windows.
Ok, so now to make that cool effect on the windows without using another texture, standing on the grunge layer, you will go to the left side of your photoshop and select the burn tool. Make sure it has a low opacity, 10% is alright, and you will just adjust the size of the brush, and start “burning” the windows. As you can see, this tool is making the selected sections darker.
To give it more a realistic look at the windows, you will adjust the size of the brush and in opacity, you will increase it to 40%, to make it darker. Make sure that when you are doing this, it has a perspective, in this case, we did the darker spots on one side to represent something like the “shadow from the sun”. Repeat on every window, roof, door, etc.
In the final image, you can see how much of a difference those shadows make. I mean, it even makes you feel like putting your hand through those windows with that depth.
Since this cad drawing has two more buildings, we downloaded another texture for the building in the middle, and we are just going to repeat the process.
Remember to look at the details of the cad drawing so this way you can adjust the brush size and opacity accordingly.
In this third building, we use a different grunge texture, and we focus more on the small details, like the roof, windows and even adding more shadowing to make more depth in the front door.
Since we used three different grunge textures, with different colors, we are just going to make this whole cad drawing black and white, there is a way to make each grunge texture black and white. Standing on the grunge texture layer, use shortcut ctrl + u and it will desaturate. Easy, right?
We want to see how it worked for you! Make your own facade drawing with a texture in photoshop and share the final result with us! You can upload the image to your Instagram and tag us or just DM us with the image! If you have any questions, make sure to comment down below 🙂
Look at our YouTube video on how to make these facade drawings here.
