Attaching a Texture to a Brush

Creating Texture to Scan

• Using a coarse brush, coat illustration board with gesso, modeling paste, or matte medium. Make sure to use a loaded brush so that you get lots of thick brushstrokes. 
• After the textured board dries, cover it with flat black acrylic paint. Dry brush white paint over the “peaks” to bring out the texture. A 4 by 5 inch area should be enough. 
• You can create another great texture by rubbing a black colored pencil over cold press watercolor paper. Be careful not to press too hard because you only want to hit the “peaks” of the textured paper. A smaller area will work well for this dry media texture. 

Gel medium (left) and colored pencil on watercolor paper (right)

Optimizing Your Scanned Texture

• Scan in grayscale at 200 ppi.
• To increase contrast, open Levels (cmd–L).

Slide the Black Point and White Points toward the histogram curve. 

• Slide black and white point toward the middle of the tonal curve. 
• In order to exaggerate the texture, Sharpen using the SmartSharpen Filter (Menu > Filter > Sharpen > SmartSharpen). I usually use the settings 100% at 1 pixel.
• Optimize for tiling. Filter > Other > Offset (see below), then move the sliders until the seam cuts right through the middle of the image. Use the Clone Stamp to get rid of the seam and to clean up the texture (opt-click to set the point of origin, then paint over the seams. Reset the point-of-origin frequently). 
• Edit > Define Pattern, give it a descriptive name.
• You can use these textures as “bump maps” on your illustrations (which I'll describe in a later post to be titled "Mapping Textures") and you can attach them to Brushes (see "Attaching a Texture to a Brush" below).

Move the sliders until the seam cuts through the middle.

Attaching a Texture to a Brush

• With a Brush as the active tool, go to the Brush Panel. Check Texture, and then click on the Pattern Picker flyout to select the Pattern that you created. Remember, you must save the texture as a Pattern in order for it to show up in the list (step 5 from above).
• Make sure that “Texture Each Tip” is unchecked, and Mode should be Multiply. 
• Then adjust Scale, Brightness, and Depth.
• Transfer should be checked. 
• You may want to change the “Invert” setting to bring out the texture.

Choose your texture from saved grayscale Patterns.

Check and highlight "Texture" to get these options. "Transfer" will help bring out textures.

Textured Brush strokes. They show up well on a toned base.