Texture-making Tutorial (original) (raw)

I like having a bunch of textures on hand, in case I'm working on an icon and it feels like it needs a little extra color. I prefer to make textures and brushes on my own (that way I don't need to worry about adding a note about credit to brushmakers when I enter icontests... ^_^) and I thought other people might be interested in a quick tutorial on texture-making.

Program: Photoshop 7, generally translatable Difficulty: Easy Requirements: Basic knowledge of Photoshop

What I suggest is going here, here, here, or someplace similar, and downloading a bunch of photographs of paper and cloth.

Find some wrinkled paper, some torn paper, some shadowed paper-- anything that might give your icons a little oomph. Film and photographs work well too, as does wallpaper, and ink-splattered paper. And printed textiles (plaid, paisley, batik) can be indispensible.

Once you've downloaded your images, you'll want to create icon-sized-ish brushes out of them.

First, make sure your images are crisp-- you may want to duplicate the Background layer and set the duplicate to Overlay to give the blacks and whites some definition.

I don't recommend making 100 X 100 brushes, as that gives you so little wiggle room: I prefer 110 X 110 or even 104 X 104. If I'm working with a rectangular image I usually resize it so that the shortest size is 104 and then just create a brush out of the whole thing. (If you don't know how to create brushes in Photoshop, read this tutorial. Basically, you select the thing you want to make a brush out of and then go to Edit -> Define Brush.)

Once you have a bunch of paper brushes, you have two options: option one is to use them on their own (stamp them on top of an icon and set them to Overlay or Multiply or Screen or something like that)... or you can use them to create textures.

There's no exact recipe for creating a brush-based texture. Use colors, filters, gradients, whatever you want, just make sure to stamp your brushes over themselves a bunch of times at different layer settings and see what you get.

Here are some examples of my texture-making process.

I have taken three brushes made from paper (wallpaper, construction paper, and organic handmade paper):

And made textures from them.

B1, B2 and B3 refer to the three brushes above: NL indicates that I made a new layer at the beginning of that step.

The pink one:

The yellow one:

The red one:

Here are some more examples of brushes + Photoshop filters + Color textures:

So, now that you've made these things, what can you do with them?

You can paste them on top of an image and set them to Screen, Multiply, Lighten, or Overlay...

Or you can paste things on top of them.

Well, there you go. If anything was unclear, please let me know. I hope you find this tutorial useful, and I would love to see anything that you create with it!