Blog

Texture tutorial

written on Jul 22
In My work, Textures, Tutorials

Hello all and welcome to my first ever tutorial. As you’ve probably noticed I use a lot of textures, especially in my personal work. Some of my textured shots on dribbble.com have received a suprisingly large amount of attention, which has led to several dribbble team players asking for a tutorial, I am of course only too happy to oblige.

Resources

You can download all the files used in a zip file here. Inside are the two texture jpegs used and the final psd file (cs4) for reference.

Step 1

I started off with a light green background with a simple illustration in a layer above it.

Step 2

I firstly copied and pasted texture_1.jpg on a layer above the illustration and set blend mode to vivid light and opacity to 54%. I then duplicated this layer, then made the duplicate black and white (image > adjustments > black & white), then set blend mode to overlay and opacity to 43%.

Step 3

Lastly I copied and pasted texture_2.jpg over the top of the last two and set blend mode to overlay and opacity to 70%. And that’s it!

Summary

I hope you’ve found this quick tutorial useful, as you can see it’s super easy to apply textures. I think the trick is applying them to the right subject and firstly picking the right texture to use and then not over-doing it (which I found out the hard way). There’s no right or wrong way to use them it’s just a matter of trial and error and experimentation.

If you want some more textures to play with you can head on over to my free texture site takemytexture.com where I make available all the texture pics that I take myself.

Thanks for reading.