Okay, so I spent some time messing around with this thing people are calling the ‘Nik Caner Medley’. Saw it floating around, looked kind of interesting, so I thought, why not give it a shot myself?
First off, I had to figure out what it actually was. Seemed like a mix, a ‘medley’, of specific visual styles this Nik Caner guy is known for. Sort of sharp, digital glitchy stuff mixed with smoother, almost hand-drawn looking textures. My goal was simple: try and make something that looked like the examples I’d seen online.
Getting Started
I pulled up my usual graphics software. Nothing fancy, just the program I use for most things. Then I started digging through my own photos and some stock image sites. I needed a base image, something with strong lines to start with. Found an old photo of some city buildings that I thought would work.
Next, I needed the textures. I remembered taking some pictures of tree bark and rusty metal a while back. Found those files and pulled them into the project too. So now I had my main ingredients: one city photo, a couple of texture photos.
The Process – Trying Things Out
I started layering things. Put the city photo down first. Then I tried to get that ‘glitch’ effect. I didn’t have a special ‘Nik Caner’ button, obviously. So I did it the hard way. Copied bits of the image, shifted them around, messed with the colors in small sections. Used some pixel sorting effects I found, just playing with the sliders until it looked broken in a cool way. This took a while, lots of trial and error.
Once the base looked sufficiently messed up, I brought in the textures. I slapped the tree bark texture over one part, the rusty metal over another. Set them to different layer modes – overlay, soft light, multiply, just cycling through to see what stuck. This part was tricky. Making the rough textures blend with the sharp digital glitches without looking totally random wasn’t easy.
- Tried masking parts of the textures.
- Used soft brushes to blend edges.
- Adjusted the opacity a lot.
- Even added some noise to try and unify things.
Hitting a Wall (Almost)
At one point, it just looked like a mess. The glitches and textures were fighting each other. Felt like I wasn’t getting that specific ‘medley’ vibe. I almost scrapped it. But then I took a break, came back, and decided to simplify. I removed one of the textures entirely and focused on making the tree bark work with the glitched city photo. I also desaturated the image quite a bit, which seemed to help tie it all together.
Finishing Up
After more tweaking – adjusting contrast, sharpening some areas, blurring others – I finally got something I didn’t hate. It wasn’t exactly like the examples I saw online, but it had that mix of digital chaos and organic feel. It felt like my take on the ‘Nik Caner Medley’.
So yeah, that was my afternoon. Spent a good few hours clicking and dragging and undoing. It’s a finicky process, this medley thing. Requires patience. But kinda satisfying when you finally wrestle it into shape. Might try it again sometime, maybe with different base images.
