Digital Art Techniques - Textures

Textures can make a big difference when painting digitally because they provide detail which would be almost impossible to draw by hand. By adding simple textures you can make your paintings more interesting and give it some life which it wouldn't have normally.

Objects such as rocks
First I will show you how I use textures to create objects such as rocks without having to draw all of the cracks etc which would take a very long time otherwise.

Here we start off with a rock type shape which literally took me 30 seconds to paint using a hard brush and flow at 5% and a black colour. Make sure the rocks are on a layer of its own.  (Click on the images below to get a bigger view).

First we start with a very simple rock shape and I usually have lots of rocks all on top of each other etc. If you cannot make them up then just use a reference. Just so the rocks are not floating in mid-air I added a shadow layer to make things look a little more realistic.






Next you need to find a texture of some rocks or a wall, anything that looks like something above but make sure you experiment with lots of different types. Sometimes textures that have nothing to do with what you are painting works too. This goes on its own layer also. It is best if you change the textures into black and white before using them otherwise you are going to be stuck to the colours that the textures give you. Image->Ajustments->Desaturate to do this.

Now you need to make the texture shape the same as the rocks and there is an easy way to do this. Hold down CTRL and click the little image of the rocks (your painting not the texture) in the layers panel. This will select all of the rocks, go to the Select menu and inverse it. Now you have everything selected which is not the rocks; on the texture layer hit delete and now your painting should look the same as the picture to the left.

One of the most important steps is to make sure the texture layer is in 'Overlay' mode which means it mimmicks the shading that is underneath. You will see now that it is starting to look like rocks.

Now I have merged the texture into the rock just by right clicking in the layers tab on the layer and hitting merge down. Now we only have one layer with rocks on there.

 Now you have your rock layer make sure you paint on there and change it to how you want.This is a starting point for your rocks and not a finished product. The light and shadow will need work because the textures will not do it all for you.

The great colourise tool in photoshop (CTRL-SHIFT-U) will bring up that box you see on the left. Make sure you check the 'colourize' box or it won't do anything. Then just fiddle until you get the rocks you like.





And here we have the final image of a couple of rocks. Not very exciting I know but considering it took me about 10 minutes and the possibilites for making cool landscapes are endless.

This is a real  painting of the exact same technique as I used for the rocks:

Conclusion
This may look like a lot of steps to remember but in reality there is only a few, that you can repeat quite easily after a few attempts. I know from experience when you read tutorials there are usually so many steps, that there is no way you can remember how to do it. I try and keep things simple so I do not have to look anything up, so here is a quick list for creating textures:

• Paint whatever you want to texture on it's own layer
• Put your texture on top and overlay - change opacity of the layer if too strong - crop to match layer underneath
• Merge your paint and texture and modify 

Not just rocks -  even though this tutorial shows you how to use textures on rocks it is intended for any object that requires texturing. The same technique can be used on trees, metal objects, wood etc so experiment and you will see it looks cool on pretty much anything.