Texture Tutorial

Hi! And welcome to part three of my three-part painting tutorial, which is focused on creating a particular texture for your piece.

Now, there are two ways you can get an interesting background for your work. The first is to use a design or texture that either you or someone else have previously made. The other is to create a custom texture/design for your work. For this, I’m going to do the latter.

1. First step is pretty easy. Remember that oh so amazing background you just created? Save a copy of that, clouds and all. Then open it as its own new file (remember to change its file type to either an .xcf if you’re working in GIMP, or .psd for Photoshop etc). This is what mine looks like without Fon somewhere in the middle; nice and dreamy. Now do you remember those themes? Dreams, water and happiness were mine, so I’m going to see if I can incorporate that into this. For my piece, the dreams theme is the biggest influence, so I'm going to use some brushes (i.e. flowers) that create the most dream-like effect in this texture. If you don’t have any, then that’s fine; use what you have, create your own, or download (and credit!) some made by someone else.

2. Right click on your layer (in the layer box), and select Add Layer Mask before selecting Grayscale copy of layer. Once that’s done, right click on the layer and select “mask to selection” before creating a new layer.

3. Go to the gradient tool, select whatever gradient you want to use, and add it inside the fuzzy grey lines. To add extra effect, change the layer mode to any one that fits (I’m using addition to create a sweet, dreamy kind of effect). Once done, go to the flip tool and mess around to your heart’s content. Personally, I wouldn’t recommend using the rotate tool because there’s a chance you could lose some of your work, depending on the angle, but it’s really up to you. Anchor the layer. Right click on the background layer, and select “delete layer mask.”

4. Create a new layer, and call it whatever you want. I’m calling mine “sun” because that’s what I’ll be creating in this layer. Now, when it gets to this point, you have three choices. The first is to use brushes to create amazing patterns and whatnot. The second is to draw manually/using a tool. And the third is to combine these two practices, which I’m going to do. Using the ink tool (diamond shape and a very large adjustment size) via the paths tool (choose the “stroke with a paint tool” option, Ink (from the drop down menu), and “emulate brush dynamics”), I created a few light beams in the shape of a flower head. Once completed, go to filters > artistic > oilify. Adjust the settings to your preference and press okay. It should make the lines more interesting. Then, using a bokeh brush, add the centre of the sun. To make the design more interesting, it’s best to use duel colours, add little patterns inside the design (the lighten only/darken only brush modes help with that) before altering the layer mode. Duplicate the layer and, once again, change the layer mode.

5. Create a new layer for some design. I’m going to use one of my own flower brushes, but there are loads of lovely flower brushes available on dA that you can use instead. On this layer, I’ve randomly dotted the flowers, but have altered the scale, depending on the distance I want them to represent. For the purpose of this piece, and for continuity purposes, I’ve used a dark plum shade for this, before altering the layer mode to burn, which allows me to obtain this effect.

6. Save a copy of your new design and reopen your main art piece .xcf/.psd file.

7. Add your texture either in front of the subject or behind; I usually go for behind. Change mode to whatever looks best.

8. Lastly, customise the rest of your piece using whatever effects/brushes/etc you like whilst keeping your themes in mind. And there you have it! Save as both an .xcf/.psd and a .jpg/.png so you can always go back and play with it some more.

Hope this has proved useful. If you have any questions, then please don't hesitate to ask.

Part one (colouring): [link]
Part two (background): [link]
Dreamland Watertale: [link]
Texture: [link]

Fon is the copyright property of Amano Akira.