How to Add Texture to your Art - Give your work an Analogue Traditional Feel Easily and Quickly...

one of the first and most important things that the aspiring digital artists seems to seek out is brushes and brush packs we seem to have this insatiable desire to find the perfect brush and a lot of that i feel is driven by wanting to find brushes that have texture and an analog feel so that we can bring our digital work closer to the randomness and the variety that we naturally get when we're working in a traditional medium now there's a variety of ways you can actually get this sort of feel and look in your work in this video i want to look at how to get a textured feel to the surface of our images using some simple easy quick techniques in photoshop let's jump in and get started [Music] all right so my name is tim mcburney i've been a professional artist for 20 years and a professional drawing teacher for 10 years and i'm here to help you draw cool stuff from your imagination and master the craft of line and color illustration now the reason that we might want to add texture is that it gives the work a more cohesive look this is one of the most important things that i find and i think this is sort of linked to our desire for that traditional media look it can also bring different elements of the image together this effect also can really suit some projects that might require that sort of grittiness or texture in their subject matter or just the style of the project that you're working on and it can also be a really easy way to add some sort of quick visual interest and complexity to an otherwise fairly simple image now what we're going to be doing is essentially adding our textures over the top in photoshop as part of the coloring and grading process so this is what i would have started with in this image in particular and if we zoom up again really what we're dealing with is a very very simple line and color illustration we've got line work that's colored and it's all pretty flat and what i'm doing is essentially adding both a noise layer and again you can sort of see here is that noise layer the noise layer is sort of bringing everything together a little bit and again just giving the surface of the painting a slightly rougher look and before that what we're dealing with again is the difference between this which has some of that texture applied using some simple scatter brushes and this where again we sort of don't have that so it's a mix of both using some sort of simple custom brushes that are just there to kind of add texture like nothing else we're not painting with those brushes we're just going over the top and you know using them to sort of again just sort of add texture everywhere and we're doing that in between the character and the background as well to add atmosphere and again that is sort of done mixed in as part of the color grading and color adjustment process at the end so that's really what we're going to be doing and all i'm going to do is share with you some thoughts but why i think this works and how i think you should think about it because again it's easy to show a technique but applying that technique i i think needs a little bit of sort of theory behind it in terms of you know how do we link this to picture making and again i'll sort of you know go through in detail how we do this now if you're interested in this type of image and this style of line and color illustration the texture stuff is a little bit more of an advanced technique but if you're interested in the learning the basics which i think are the most important you can go check out my line and color quick start guide which sort of covers the techniques that i would use to get to this stage we just have a simple line drawing and we've sort of colored that line drawing in photoshop so go check that out it goes over all of the basic techniques and my thought process and my recommendation for how you approach and learn to do this and yeah you can sort of add the textures that we're going to go over in in this video and get a very very similar process and workflow to what would have gotten me to this stage okay let's talk a little bit more about the surface of the page and how texture can be used and how i sort of came to be using a lot of it as i you know work in this sort of line and color style because again lining color often what people are trying to do is sort of get really clean results you know often the western um and you know the european uh and the japanese sort of manga comic book style is one of like super clean lines and what we're trying to do is kind of avoid any sort of sketchiness or roughness right because again when we're working traditionally we're often trying to remove the feeling of things being kind of rough or too analog right what feels professional in those instances is you know cleanness right not having any messiness to the line so again often what's happening is that we're actually trying to counteract the natural clinical nature of digital art where we don't have any natural texture or anything we kind of have to create that and put it in consciously whereas making things very clean is quite easy digitally so it's you can always think of it as a the traditional sort of version of art is where um getting things to be clean and precise is is very tricky and we need to put a lot of effort into that versus digital it's very easy to um you know make things look too clinical too clean and not have any life not have any texture so we're often trying to put a lot of effort into putting that back into the art now again i sort of started doing this as part of the process that i developed where i would simply be coloring pencil drawings that i'd scan in and i made them this sort of sepia tone and that was really just to get around the technical limitations of what i was dealing with i always liked the subtlety of pencil art i didn't want to ink things and add these kind of really harsh lines it just is not really how my brain personally works again you may be similar you may have a a particular way that again you like to draw and you like to create i kind of like to build things up and um so i could kind of often be doing these pencil drawings and you know some people again were trying to avoid this the inking phase and you know just kind of create pencils scan them and adjust the contrast and that's kind of what i was doing but again my goal was not to get things looking clean my goal was just to kind of create an image that i liked the the process that i developed was one where again instead of trying to get rid of all of these little you know sort of sketchy bits and pieces i actually kind of leaned into it and the first problem you would kind of find that that i noticed a lot of people would deal with is again you know here's a panel from seven pirates and it's a bunch of pirate ships it's not quite it's not a big panel so we don't need heaps of detail but again my process for working this up would leave a lot of lines everywhere and a little bit of sort of grayness at the edge of these kind of thicker darker lines and when we color underneath this if we set this to multiply within photoshop these areas are gray and it kind of just makes the color underneath grayer and darker and you you would kind of lose some color vibrancy and it kind of just makes everything a little bit sort of gray and mushy so what i did was that i would make those um lines a particular color i'd add a specific sort of color grade to them that essentially just affected the darker colors and the lighter colors a little bit differently so as they went towards being sort of very light gray they kind of turned yellow and then when we multiplied those lines on top of if we can find the the page from seven pirates there when we um multiply those colors those lines onto colors underneath instead of it kind of going gray right it kind of adds a little bit of sort of texture right and adds a little bit of color vibrancy so it kind of bring the colors up in vibrancy up towards the warm which is kind of an appealing look it worked for a lot of the projects that i was working on and so i kind of just sort of lent into that and um as a consequence of that it kind of had a very very textual look everything kind of had this sort of textured look textured vibe and when i would come to create work digitally i also really wanted that probably in the same way that people who are painting um you know traditionally and you get this sort of natural texture right i wanted a similar thing that would again allow me to get that sort of look and that really is where a lot of these techniques started i would be experimenting with this and also trying to get some feeling of painterliness to a line and color style because i always liked a lot of what was possible when people did paint and they were able to kind of blend things out lose some edges add atmosphere and do those things which again was kind of often a little bit separate to what you would get with the traditional line and color style where we're dealing with very crisp lines and sort of you know relatively sort of flat or like highly sort of polished rendered shiny colors all right so let's look at how we actually do this now we'll come back to these more complicated scenes with multiple layers that separates it at the foreground from the middle ground from the background from the far background again this is a relatively complicated file with a lot of sort of different elements right and essentially all of these you know different elements here are included on separate layers and the image allows me to put atmosphere and texture behind those and that's what allows me to kind of fade things back but if we look at this from the most basic technique with a simple image we can understand how that's sort of basically functioning so let's get rid of all this texture and then we'll kind of add it as we go so here's what we would begin with so the idea here is we start with a purely simple line and color with flat color technique and as part of kind of both adding atmosphere to this image and also adjusting the focal point of the image the hierarchy of detail where we basically should look and the colors that are involved we can also sort of add texture and it's done in a variety of ways you can see here with the background um the files organized such that we have the character uh if we deselect that so the character is on a separate sort of set of layers to the background and that allows me again below this set of layers here to put in some texture and you can see what i've done there is just put in some texture with a scatter brush now what i mean by a scatter brush is a large textural brush that allows itself to kind of scatter around so again this is the one i've got i've actually included these two brushes the two main brushes i would use for texture here in that quick start guide there's sort of a textured brushes photoshop set so you can play around with these ones specifically but really it's a matter of just understanding the basic theory which is that this brush sort of scatters a whole bunch of of texture around the place and this is kind of what it looks like if we set it to a high opacity this is what's happening and so all that i'm doing is just sort of essentially adjusting the opacity of that so set this opacity a lot lower maybe it's sort of again 20 and what i'm able to do then again is sort of take you know any sort of color and as i sort of move it around it's going to put a very sort of softer version of that texture so it's a mixture that mix of a very harsh sort of you know rough texture but a low opacity now the basic theory here because again it's easy to kind of just say well let's just spam that around and hope for the best what i'm trying to do here especially for instance where i'm dealing with the background is is i'm kind of trying to fade a lot of this stuff here into the background so that the head sort of appears more prominent again it's not just a matter of like adding texture and putting stuff over the top that's kind of it but there is more sort of logic to it and what i'm doing there is i'm kind of mixing these colors so i'm taking some of the the lighter colors and maybe some of the darker colors and i'm kind of blending them together right so basically similar to where you would kind of like blend if you're painting in photoshop and you can see that's the difference if we sort of turn it off turn it on again it's very very subtle right but what it's doing is that is sort of homogenizing these background elements together and that makes them have less contrast and when they have less contrast our eye is less drawn to them and so thus we are actually more drawn to the character's face which is what i want because that is our primary read in this image so again it's not a matter of texture if you add too much texture that's going to sort of draw our eye to the contrast and the grittiness there in some images i want that but in some images what i'm actually trying to do is kind of bring this together but do it in a slightly more interesting way now you could just do this with a big airbrush but if i do it with a textured brush again it gives it a slightly more nuanced look and it adds all those things we talked about before such as sort of again bringing the image together adding visual interest sort of making it feel a little bit less like again this sort of very rough color and stuff that i've added makes it feel as if that's a little bit more sophisticated than it actually is so again that's the first technique um we're actually sort of gonna push and homogenize some values and and colors and things within the background and again it's a similar technique that i would use all over the image to adjust focus by again bringing things lower in contrast and sort of you know maybe with color adjustments and levels sort of bringing other things up in contrast so again that's often what's happening i'm bringing the background together and adding atmosphere but i'm doing it with a textured brush now what else is happening so the other thing that's sort of happening is this where i sort of have a different brush here if we grab that brush that one is so this is this little brush set you should have dust particles and the splatter so the dust particles again is is a similar kind of scatter brush but it's it's not sort of quite so textured it's really just sort of throwing these chunks of stuff around the place again i forget where i got these brushes hopefully they're not from someone's sort of you know special brush set or anything i think they're from brush sets that are freely available but again they're included in that quick start guide if you want to check them out and all i'm doing as you can see is exactly the same thing so i'm picking a color from within the image right and i'm using that as this kind of like scatter brush and what that does again is it's it's using sort of painting over the top of the lines basically so again the lines for that character are down there well below everything else there we go so you know they're above the lines above everything and this just again adds that sort of texture adds a slightly sort of gritty look to things and again it's important that again i'm sort of doing that and picking colors from within the image to to allow me to do that because again it makes it feel a little bit more natural sometimes i'm picking again sort of lighter colors and painting them across darker areas sometimes i might be picking um a darker color right and painting it across sort of the lighter areas of the image now again if i change anything below these kind of scatter brush textural layers the whole thing doesn't work right so it's not necessarily a non-linear process i need to make sure that again everything i do before this is kind of pretty close and so that's where i probably work up in the from the background to the to the foreground doing that now again what i'm doing after that is just sort of adjusting the colors and adding a color grade so again a couple of techniques there one is again atmospheric texture the other is this kind of like floating dust particle or big sort of like chunky texture again i'm often doing that with low opacity and i'm being subtle with it and i'm being careful you know that if i put a big chunk of that texture across the face and it kind of interferes with the eyes or anything then again i'll erase that out or like move it around i'm making sure that it you know it's quite specific and it and it does what i need it to do now the next technique or i guess the third technique there is adding a noise layer and the noise layer all that that is doing is just kind of adding this um sort of noise layer that if we set the blending modes correctly and we do it sort of just so it sort of pushes the noise into that image and kind of makes it just like a little bit lighter lighter a little bit darker right on a very sort of granular level now how do we do that that's actually pretty simple what we do let's make a new layer right so new layer there and what we'll do is we will set that to 50 percent gray and i'm just going to go edit fill and that's going to fill it with this like just flat 50 gray now the thing with 50 gray is if we set it to overlay it becomes transparent and that's really important what we do then is we actually add the noise so filter um noise add noise and that's just kind of what i'm going to set it to i'm going to leave it with color you can make it monochromatic but that's basically what it's doing and so it's sort of moving the values from that 50 grades making some of them a little bit lighter some of them a little bit darker and it's adding again just a variety of colors and values and hue shifts within that so again there's a few things extra to do um because again that's that's a nice effect but it's not quite exactly what we want um the first thing i do is i'll desaturate that right so again you there's shortcuts for these but i'm just going to go image adjustment hue saturation and i'm just going to bring the saturation down now again i feel like this is a little bit better than just kind of playing all out you know making it monochromatic to begin with because there's still some color variation it's just all desaturated quite a bit the other thing is that sometimes the scale of this noise is going to be maybe too small or too big depending on you know what your resolution of your canvas is if you find that the noise is a little bit small you know here i think it probably is a little bit small you can either just scale this layer up all right so we can just sort of make that layer a little bit bigger and what that'll do again if we sort of zoom back in is make that a little bit sort of bigger and you can see that's sort of similar to what i sort of had here to begin with right it's it's a little bit bigger now the only difference obviously that i've sort of got here is that this layer that i had originally was reduced in opacity all right so we just pull that opacity down and that gives us that sort of nice again sort of like simple textured look now all i would say in addition to that just as like a little sort of quick tip is if you have just sort of res this up right what you'll probably find is all around here if you don't kind of have the right sort of crop you know non-visible pixels on then i've got a giant huge chunk of noise just kind of sitting outside the canvas and this noise actually takes up a huge amount of space in your file so you know if you do have a giant file and then you just kind of like transform again this kind of this noise layer and you make it huge just understand that is going to make your file huge a really simple way to do that is just scale it to the size you want right we'll hit control or the mac equivalent and we will just or we can go actually you can go control a and that selects all of the canvas i've got the layer selected i'm going to i'm going to hit ctrl j and what that does is it just copies just the pixels that we sort of see there and now i've got a layer that's just the right size and i can delete that one right so we can now delete that one and i don't have that if i go to transform it again it's just sort of fit there so i basically just sort of cut out that layer based on the bounds of the image and i pasted it there again just just i want to mention it because again sometimes it's tricky it's tricky to understand that gradients and noise layers can add huge huge huge size to your file which again just makes you know if you put a few of them in there i mean sometimes you just end up with like you know gigabytes worth of files for absolutely no reason right you can't see it anyway that is the basic technique there that's sort of what's happening we make a 50 gray layer we set that to overlay we then add noise we desaturate the noise we adjust the scale of the layer and then we adjust the opacity of the layer and that gives us again this sort of texture that overlays on top of everything and kind of again brings the image together homogenizes the image together you could obviously purchase or create your own texture packs based off paper that might do a similar thing you could adjust them again so that they work in a similar way adjust them so that they're close to that 50 gray area set them to overlay or a different blending mode you can play around with that i just use noise because it's simple and easy and cheap and that's what i'm all about with this stuff so anyway there you go that is the basic technique that's how i get that look all right now let's look at some of those slightly more complicated um files that are more about sort of giant scenes etc and let's look at how that basic same technique plays out again i won't demonstrate it again but i'll just sort of show you how that kind of works again these are big files but basically we've got a similar sort of look here where again i have a bunch of sort of texture and color grading over the top this is an image and i always sort of mention this when i sort of show this image where again i played around with the color adjustment and a lot of those sort of textural effects i think there was a lot of interest in some of these original shapes that i had that were part of the composition that i kind of lost by kind by um sort of grading it all down a little bit so again that that's a good example of how again can be really useful to look at old files you've got and see how some of these techniques might affect things might be good to try some of this texture on an old image of yours see whether it kind of works but yeah you the way i think about it is i i have a thumbnail and um you know that sort of tells me what roughly i should be doing and then i go about sort of creating the image and i do a lot of the the adjustment and the illustrative stuff where i think about the plan i had and whether that's going to work and how i can adjust colors and push things around i do a lot of that including this texture work at the end but here you can see that what i have is again a bunch of different layers here and i've got the if we sort of go here right i've got these sort of foreground layers these foreground characters are on sort of here and it's it's in between these and the the layer underneath that i put a lot of that atmosphere and texture and again this is just very sort of soft like building it up adjusting it but that's what gives us that feeling of again atmosphere and sort of depth even though we've got a fairly simple line and color image and that process is just repeated the further back we go now it's important to understand that these things build up so you do have to think about it you don't want to put heaps and heaps of texture and atmosphere on your sort of far distant layers because what will happen anyway is that the more you sort of add on top of everything will kind of push that back so it's really think a matter of thinking about the hierarchy of what you want to be in front what you want to be behind and how you can think about again adjusting those colors and adjusting that that atmosphere and does that affect things again you do have to experiment with this process like any sort of process but that's basically it it's the same kind of idea just on a larger scale and we're just pushing the image around and adjusting it as we go so the last thing i want to talk about is just why i think this is sort of important now i if we look at sort of different things that i did over over the years if we look at sort of a page from my sort of like ara comic what you tend to find is that again when we're printing something you can often get away with having a little bit of kind of messiness and the surface of the painting surface of the work can be a little bit kind of rougher because the printing process itself will kind of squish everything down it will add a surface and a texture to everything by default so because the printing process kind of gets rid of rid of a lot of these sort of super harsh edges and it kind of again homogenizes the image both from a tonal point of view and a color point of view by default i think that going forward thinking about the surface of the painting and the page a little bit more is going to be really really key because we have to control a lot of these things as digital artists and the more print goes away and the more people will be reading comics like this on their ipad the more we have to think about getting many of those subtleties to work for us as opposed to you know maybe um often what we'd have to do is sort of push the contrast and push the sharpness of everything because we know it's going to get sort of damaged a little bit and and pushed back as it gets printed so again as we move forward into the you know the digital age where you know we're going to probably see more people reading and consuming stuff on high high resolution ipads and tablets high resolution screens you know it's not um impossible to understand that or it's not impossible to anticipate that people will be reading very very high resolution um things on screens going forward and that will be able to sort of show a lot of texture and a lot of nuance um you know that way in the future in fact i think it will be important because print just won't be able to compete with the color vibrancy you get with modern high-res you know sort of 16k plus screens with high dynamic range and you know the the range of colors that they can reproduces is going to be really really immense and really really important to art going forward so think about how you can adjust the surface of the page and maybe again learn something that we've you know sort of learned from those kind of like older techniques and see if we can kind of bring some of them forward the basic idea is that you know what i had used to have to do again for that ira comic is i'd probably have to push a lot of the contrast past the point where it would look good on screen on screen it would be like oh that's too much contrast then you print it and you realize like wow okay you know i i can barely see it anyway you know i could have added twice as much contrast that's typically how that used to go you had to really push things because the printing process would destroy it so if we look at this image for instance um this would not print well okay um it's sort of meant to have a very sort of old you know sort of textural look um and you know that's part of the game world that we were designing with this image and look you know um if if we tried to print this where you know this is all sort of faded out and a little bit kind of dark this would completely turn to mush and you probably wouldn't be able to see any of that detail there if we printed it so again i think going forward what we're going to have to consider is not just sort of you know digital versus print but also you know digital versus modern super high res high dynamic range digital and the amount that you're going to be able to get out of that in terms of color vibrancy is sort of crazy and again what that sort of means is like well you can make people's eyes bleed by putting all this contrast in but should you because in many ways what we sort of learned throughout the years playing around with sort of different techniques for creating stuff you know with different printing techniques is that often these things can be very helpful right a lot of the times again you know people were trying to get these really sort of crisp effects and and looks from their you know um traditional sort of work printed and the printing process sure it would sort of push things down um and make uh you know make our images a little bit muddy but it it it forced us to create very strong illustrations and that's something that the golden age of illicit of illustration you know in the sort of the 20s and 1920s sorry like a hundred years ago now um that really showed us how to create images that would survive being destroyed with bad printing and it's important to remember those things as well and remember again that we're designing this image and a lot of the stuff that used to exist um maybe through you know sort of you know just it just sort of happened to turn out that way right we had to figure out how to make images that were so strong that they would survive printing there's a lot of knowledge there right there's a lot of wisdom there that again we still use today even though today often the task is to kind of maybe push the image down a little bit more make it more subtle because again we have unlimited colors that we can choose and to add in some of that texture and vibrancy and nuance and randomness and organicness and that analog feel right that again it is some people might view that as being um you know nostalgic and idealistic but again i think there's there's fundamental truth there about how the eye functions and what you know what people like to look at and how easy it is to look at where again you don't always want to make it hyper crisp hyper bright hyper colorful right it's got to fit the mood of what you want so anyway i think it's really key to consider these things and think about what sort of surface of your page you want how do you want to go about it again you could use this technique you could use a modified version of this technique that i've shown you you could again just kind of search for brushes that you would um you know use to put in the flat colors that might you know automatically give you some of that what i like is simple effective cheap easy solutions to these things because i'm more interested in the story and the narrative and um you know the the intent behind the image as opposed to again you know fancy brush work and that sort of stuff because that's just the style that i'm into the line and color style if that style is something you're interested in developing and learning further go check out my quick start guide which goes over the basics how to get the fundamental lines and think about composition think about thumbnailing how that applies to even very simple images like the one i include in the quick start tutorial you can also get my brushes that i use for that simple technique and also the ones as i said here that will help you get the same sort of textural effects so go check that out if that's something you're interested in again it's free um and it should teach you the basics which are the most important right the surface stuff is important but the basics are what will get you there and those are often the things that really are at the core of whether or not your image is you know getting the right feeling or not whether it's successful or not the textual stuff is important because of the things i've mentioned and i think it'll be you know important to consider those things as we go forward and i think doing it this way again is a really easy simple technique and it sort of avoids us needing to go looking for a million brushes and you know really sort of hyper focusing on again trying to get that sort of natural feel i think the most important thing to think about is the intent and the narrative and the story and the emotion and the character behind your images that's what will make the difference i feel like that's what people really care about anyway that's all i've got thanks for hanging out and talking about drawing and comics with me we'll catch you around happy drawing you

Channel: Tim Mcburnie - The Drawing Codex

Views: 40,023

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Id: _938lSWDh-A

Length: 35min 33sec (2133 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 07 2021