In this tutorial I show one of the techniques I use to create my “painterly” textures, which do not have the “pasted on” feel that a normal texture based on a photo would have. As an added bonus my method creates a texture which is far more versatile than any normal tiling texture. This tutorial also shows how to add perspective to your texture and gives a few hints on how to camoflage the fact that you are using a texture in the first place.

Tools needed for this tutorial: Photoshop (I use Potoshop Elements 2)

Everything starts with an analog sketch – and to make things easier later I take special care to make the texture “tile” already at this stage. What’s important to remember when creating a texture is to make sure to keep the texture uniform all around so you don’t get the pattern feel you get when you can easily spot the repeating elements. Start by drawing the edges – use a ruler to get the lines aligned on the opposite side of the square – then move in filling the entire area.

Once you’ve scanned the image and cropped out all the unwanted lines you need to make sure the alignment is in place. This can be done using special software which is used for this purpose (I use TextureMagic on MacOSX) or you can simply do it all in Photoshop as explained in the next paragraph. I want a very high quality texture so I scan the image at 300dpi – the cropped version is about 500×500 pixels in size.

Choose Filter > Other > Offset… and insert appropriate numbers in the text fields. This will offset the image x and y pixels left and down respectively and you will now have a 100% correct alignment on the edges of the canvas and maybe some glitches in a cross shaped area in the middle. Depending on how well you made your sketch you now have more or less work to do to fix up those glitches.

The cleaned up sketch

Once you’re done aligning the texture, you can fill selected parts of it with a flat color (in my case it’s the brown for the “cracks”). Do this in a separate layer if you want a transparent texture. If you’re really picky you finish off with the alignment procedure explained above a second time just to make sure. The advantage of a texture that only has 2 colors (one flat color and transparency or alfa) – is that it becomes a very versatile tool compared to the usual textures you can find on the net for instance (more about this later).

Now hit Select All (Command/Cntr-A) and make sure you have the layer which you want to make a texture of selected and Copy (Command/Cntrl-C) the selection and choose New from Clipboard from the File menu. Next choose Define Pattern… from the Edit menu and hit OK. The texture is done, you can now “paint” using the texture using the Pattern Stamp tool (under the Clone Stamp tool in the toolbar or hit Shift-S to cycle thru the Stamp tools)

I mentioned earlier that this texture stamp is more versatile than an ordinary texture, and here’s an example to show why it is so. Since this stamp is transparent and has only one color – I can create any range of new textures based on this stamp by using layers creatively.

As you can see the possibilities are endless, but for now I’m going to settle for something quite simple since I want a more painterly effect, I just fill a big canvas with the texture and then fill the layer underneath with a flat color using the paint-bucket tool to create a simple texture.

After I’ve merged the layers I choose Transform > Perspective from the Image menu and drag the handles to distort the image, I also squash the image somewhat.

Now it’s time to apply the texture to the image. I place it on a layer above the sketch and then I temporarily hide that layer and use the wand tool on the sketch layer to pick out the area where I want to apply the texture, then I go back to the texture layer and choose Inverse (Shift-Command/Cntrl-I) from the Select menu to inverse the selection and hit Backspace on the keyboard to delete all the areas of the texture which I don’t want.

The texture is finally in it’s place – but what about the areas that the texture didn’t cover? Just prepare new patches of the texture and patch it up!

Place all new patches in new layers and then set the opacity of the new layers slightly lower so you can see where the textures overlap and then use a soft airbrush eraser to erase the unwanted areas of the new patches so that the new patches fade in on the previous one.

Then simply merge all these patches (after setting the opacity to 100% again) and your done!

Now you could leave it there or you could add an artistic touch by painting shadows and make it more natural by adding a a few brushstrokes so it looks like you painted the whole thing.

To give it that rough, hand drawn texture feel start by simply slapping up some color on a layer above the texture layer. Turn down the opacity on the brush so you can build up the color in many layers.

To tone it down somewhat, change the layer blending mode to multiply and turn down the opacity somewhat.

Painting the “edges” is just manual labour. My favorite brush for this sort of thing is the “Airbrush Pen Opacity Flow” brush – which allows me to paint with different opacity depending on how much pressure I apply to the pen. As you can see on the close-up below it’s not exactly rocket science.

Don’t paint edges in all cracks, missing one or two just adds to the nice randomness.

Finishing up by adding detail.

As seen on the below image I adapt the texture by simply redrawing part of it to match whatever it is I add on top of it (compare to the image above). This adds to the illusion that I painted it all by hand.

A subtle haze in the distance added with a light airbrush and shadows added in a seperate layer using layer blending mode “Darken”.

This last image where I have hidden the actual texture layer shows exactly how much of the ground that is painted.

The finished image looks like this: