Collect, Make and Digitize: A Guide to Custom Textures

1. Introduction: My name is Brad Woodard and I ran the design and illustration studio, Brave the Woods, here in Austin, Texas. In my own work, I'm known for my use of bold colors and textures. As a digital artist, I find the use of textures can bring a more approachable, tactile quality to my artwork that isn't reality flat. Working with textures can be hard. It's easy to get a little heavy-handed, use a little too much texture. We tend to slap them on at the very end as an afterthought, but it's actually an important element of design and understanding that element as something that can balance a project or change the mood or feel of the artwork is important. If we use them incorrectly, it can often clutter or distract from our message. This course is going to start away from the computer completely. I want you to look around your environment and find textures in everything. There are textures everywhere, unique textures that haven't been made yet. I know you can go online and find textures, but I want you to look around in your surroundings and pick out textures and experiment. Get our hands dirty. We're going to take those textures, we're going to apply them to paper, and then we're going to put them into the scanner. Once we scan them onto the computer, there's endless possibilities. Well, now that we have them digitized for our artwork, we can do everything from creating tiff textures that we can use in Adobe Illustrator, to making brushes for Photoshop. Our goal is to curate our own unique themed texture packs that we can sell, share, or simply use in our very next project. Let's get started. 2. Let's Find Textures: To start things off, you're going to need a few supplies. First one, you're going to use a scanner, which we're going to use a little bit later. But then you're also going to need some things like a ton of paper. Get a bunch of paper because we're going to go through a lot of iterations, we're going to experiment quite a bit and it doesn't matter what kind I use this as just some computer paper, here's some water color paper. They all had different textures so it's really up to you. We're going to get our hands dirty, like I said. So begin to get some paper towels and get some sort of container that you can put water in. I like to water down some of the paints that I'm going to be using and so I can get different effects and things like that. Some container for water would be good. As for all the other supplies only in this class, that's really up to you. You can look for things in your house, look for things outside. Textures are everywhere, there's no wrong answer, just grab everything that looks like it could give off a cool texture and bring it to your desk and start collecting them all so that we can start experimenting with them. Now I've brought a little collection of things that I found around the house and again like I said, there's no wrong answer so just use this as an idea. If you want to use these types of things, but really it's up to you what you want to bring. Some things that I brought: sponges, spray paint, different types of brushes, I've some foam brushes, some fine art brushes. I'm just [inaudible] paint brushes. Stuff from outside, here's just a little stick. I have an old brayer, you can use anything, you can even use paint rollers if you want. I brought an ink pad and I brought some black paint, some acrylic paint. You can use ink as well any types of things. I'd just like to have a lot of contrast so bringing out these types of things are nice because they'll give you different textures and just a way to apply the texture to your paper. Toothbrush,little foam dabbers, crayons, little charcoal pins, any type of pencils and your utensils like that, markers and then any random objects you find. I think I can do something cool with this little screw but anything you want. This is my collection of things. Go ahead and get yours, gather them all up and then we're going to meet in the next video and start applying these textures to paper. 3. Get Your Hands Dirty: At this point, you should have your paper out and all of those random items that you pulled from around your house, office, outside ready to make amazing textures. I'm going to walk you through, just to give you some ideas of how these can turn out, and I have a bunch of different ones as you saw, but I'm not going to go through all of them. I'm just going to go through and show you some of them and hopefully, that gives you enough ideas to move forward on your own. But feel free to experiment play there's no wrong answer. One little tip, like I said, using dark paint like a black that helps black ink, any of that stuff on white paper gives you the most contrast, and that will be helpful for when you're moving to the digital stage. Let's go ahead and get started. [MUSIC] 4. Scan Preferences: Now that your beautiful, handmade textures are in the scanner, before you scan them, we need to change a few settings. I'm using image capture because I'm on an iMac, but whatever scanning software that you have, it'll all have the same preferences in it, at least the ones that we're going be working with. The first one would be changing it from color to black and white, if that wasn't already a default. Black and white, it's easier to work with because it boosts the contrasts right away, and that's what we'd like to work with later when we're cleaning these up. It's just a step that we can save ourselves that we'd have to do later. Then for resolution, I have it set to 600 DPI, which I would recommend because it usually will set default at 150 or 300, 300 [inaudible] if you're going to be saving your images, your artwork. But if you're going to be saving a scanned image, especially with so much detail, you're going to want to do 600 DPI so we can capture all the detail that you got in that texture that you've created. Then we can work with that texture at a larger scale, and you can shrink it or do whatever you'd like to do with it once we get into Photoshop. But let's go ahead and save that as a JPEG, and then we'll hit scan. 5. Tidy Up Those Textures : Here's your scanned in texture and it looks like it's all ready to go. But pump the breaks, it's not quite ready. It's close. It's not quite ready. In order to use this in our illustrations or designs, there's going to be a few little things we need to do to clean it up first. First things first, let's go over to our layer's panel and get rid of the little locked icon. It makes us that we can't work with the layer and we definitely want to work with the layer. Now that it's gone, let's go ahead and add one more layer for a background. I use"Alt" Option "Delete" because I'm on a Mac to fill in a full layer with whatever color I have highlighted over here. We'll drop it behind so that we can use it for some contrast things later. But as we scanned it in earlier, I asked you to make it black and white. If you didn't no worries, we can do it again here. Go to Image mode and change it to gray scale and just make sure it's at gray scale because it'll help us with keeping that contrast there to get all the detail out of this because we want to extract the texture out of the background. Do want to take, I'm going to get rid of all this white. Before you do that, you want to go ahead. If you go back to Image, actually let's click on "Mixer". We're highlighting the right layer. Then we go to Image and Adjustments and there's a couple of different things that you can do. If you'd like it to be darker, you want to lose some of the details, but just make it like the big, bold texture you'd like to outline a little bit better. You go straight to threshold. It's a little more destructive, like I said. As you move the slider up and down, you'll get it'll reveal a little bit more detail. If you click "Okay" it's taken out all the Grays is just doing blacks and whites. If we "Zoom" in, you'll notice that there's no grays, you won't get any of those little brush stroke textures from the individual bristles on that dry brush that we used for this texture. But it's a cool texture without it. That's what you want. You mess the threshold. If you want to see all these little details and textures, but you still want to boost it up a little bit. The contrast, let's go into Image Adjustments and play with levels. Levels gives you a lot more control because you can work with a black slider, the white slider in the gray slider to get exactly what you want. I think that's good. I'll click "Okay". Now because we haven't set to gray scale, we can go ahead and hit "Select",go down to "Load Selection". When it's on gray scale, it'll say background gray here under the channel automatically. If it doesn't say that it means you're not on gray scale. Go back and do that. So click "Okay" and now it's selected everything but our texture. Hit "Delete" and we'll get rid of it. Command D to "Deselect". If I get rid of this background, you'll see that has in fact removed all that white. Now sometimes that makes your texture a little bit too transparent a little bit too light. You can go back a step and boost up the contrast in the earlier step. When you go into your Image Adjustments and you get it with levels or threshold. But yeah, once we go there, just to really see how this looks, it's sometimes easier to change this texture to white and I do that by going to the lock layer right here. That layer lock is just going to lock everything in that layer. But since we knocked out the backgrounds only we'll be highlighting that texture. Again, I use "Alt" Option "Delete' to fill that in. But if I have that lock there, it'll just fill in that texture and then in the background I'll do the same thing and just fill in with black. There we go. I'm going to "Zoom" out a little bit. Now I can really see what I'm working with. This is important. You can turn that off if you want. This is important because you do have to turn off because I want to go ahead and erase some of this stuff. Just keep what you want to have for the texture. Some of these outlier things make it hard to work with. I like to just erase them. I go to my eraser tool over here and then I start erasing all the stuff that I know I'm not going to want to use. Well, just get rid of all this, especially these little edges. Now we're cleaning it up. One, I mean, you can use it just like this. This is perfectly fine to use as a texture, but cleaning it up now will help you create things like custom brushes or seamless, repeatable texture patterns and things like that are making them good tiff textures for illustrator. This is just laying the groundwork in getting your texture ready and cleaned up. If I go back here, let me lock that again. You now have your isolated texture all cleaned up and ready to go. 6. PSD: Define Brush Preset: I love scanning in textures and making them into Photoshop brushes. It's a really simple process, but it's also some way I can get a little bit more control out of my texture instead of just slapping it on top of my artwork, which I do or like to do sometimes if you want an overall texture. But everything we want to get into like maybe some shadowing and things like that, it's nice to have a little bit more control and that's what the brush can do. It's only a couple steps, but you've already done all the hard part by cleaning up your scan an image. We just have a couple more things just to make your brush perfect and ready. Let's do that real quick. Go in and go to your crop tool and you're going to want to make sure that this texture is completely cropped in real time just to the edge of the texture, because you're going to want to have that brush be small. You want the brush just to incorporate the texture and all those white space. We'll crop that and zoom in a little bit. You don't want any of that texture running off or else you're going to have an edge when you go ahead and use the texture. Sometimes I'll just go even though I know that's most that's not there. Just in case there's something real fine that I'm not seeing. I don't want anything on those edges and maybe this extra stuff isn't really necessary down here. So clean it up a little bit more and make sure nothing is running over the edges. Then, like we said, we had a transparent background here that we did earlier. It's just about ready now. You could technically just go right up to "Edit", down to "Define Brush Preset" and make this into a brush. I want to change the image size because working with a brush at nearly 5,000 pixels is a beast and its going to slow down everything. I don't need that, but I'm not going to use it at that size unless I'm laying it on top of something. You may as well just make it a little bit smaller. I'm going to make mine just 2,000. That's even big and you're probably not going to use it at that size all the time. I'm going to shrink it down. But whatever, we're just going to make this happen. I have the texture, I sized it down. Sometimes I won't let you you have any issue where this is grayed out, just resize it and it usually helps. I don't know what that bug is. If someone knows tell me. But that one I'll just go ahead and resize in that pops back up. So yeah, what now that we did is hit "Define Brush". You can name your brush dry brush 1 sounds perfect to me. There you go, converted right into a brush. Now, I'll go to my demo canvas over here so we can see it. Now, black on here. That was my eraser. There you go, as a brush. I use it like a stamp. This texture is not that great to use over itself multiplied, because it just fills in all the gaps and it's solid. But you do get a cool, rough edge almost like you wiped a paper towel around. But yeah, so you can do that and it looks neat inside of clipped areas. I guess you could use it as a shadowing type thing. Doesn't look too bad. Well, there you have it. You've made your first custom Photoshop brush out of your very own scanned in textures. It's going to be pretty addictive, so I'll give you some time in between this video and the next for you to go ahead and explore and experiment because it's going to be too much fun. You're going to want to take all your textures and do the same thing. But yeah, we're going to go into the next videos and talk about what else we can do with these textures. 7. PSD: Seamless Textures: When I'm making brushes in Photoshop, sometimes I want to have a seamless pattern brush. The one that we just made was the Define Brush Preset, and now one leaves those edges here because it makes it like a stamp. Looking at this charcoal rub that I had done, it's really cool texture and actually some fun edges. If I want those edges in there, then you need to do the Define Brush Preset, which is edit. Define Brush Preset. That's what she wanted to do. I made a brush of that earlier so we can take a look at what that does again. That is basically a stamp and then when you go and click and hold, or you using a pen, awaken pen or something like that, a stylus, you'll drag on there and you'll see all these patterns here of the texture, and I don't really like, and then it fills it in completely solid. I don't like that for [inaudible] that I want to use because I really like this part of the texture, just the main charcoal texture. I don't need to have it as a stamp, maybe I want to fill in entire shape with just that texture, but I don't want it to overlay on itself. In that case we want to do a seamless pattern brush. First thing you'd like to do is crop it in. Try to make it somewhat square, but just crop in the area of the texture. I'll show you what I mean. I'll just hold shift and make this a nice tidy square. You don't want any glaring thing. For example, if I brought this down over here, you see this big white gap, if I left that there, you're going to see that repeated. Think of this as a tile and just dropping in tiles all around it at the exact same thing. You're going to see that white splotch there all the time. You'll definitely know that it's tiled. You don't want that. You want this to feel like you're just using that charcoal read on whatever size, whatever space that you want to fill. Let's move it over here, make our lives a little bit easier. Some textures work better for this method than others. It looks completely random in here these little blotches of texture. That's what you want for this type of thing otherwise it gets really tricky. Feel like set lines and stuff like that. You're going to have to go in and make that exact repeatable texture or a repeatable pattern. But for just a random texture, this is what we want to do. Let me zoom in a little bit. This one might be okay, the way we can tell is how it's going to look is going by filter, other offset, and might already have it set to moving. It'll generally start here. These sliders will start in the middle and it will have moved yet. But go ahead and check, wrap around, make sure that's done because this is what allows you to see it, tilt it. Basically it tiles at all and then it moves us so you can see where those edges would be if they were all butted up next to each other. That's generally where you start seeing the most lines. You can tell that it's tiled and we want to get rid of those. Try to maneuver this around minds actually pretty good. The texture that you don't tell a whole lot, but you can see this line here. If I zoom in even further, you'll see this definite line, these lines here where it's repeating. Now that you want to get as many of those in the middle here as you can so that we can mess with them, one way to do it is to take your clone stamp and make sure that your brush is on like a nice fuzzy brush, blur edges, and those are all default. Then let's go over, so we've got the clone stamp with that brush, and if you hit alter option on your Mac, and that brush actually is a little bit too big, you don't want to make it too big. Now click on an area not on these creases or also it'll pick that up because it's basically just copying whatever you're going to click now. Then hold that option or alt and click. Then go over to the areas that have that line and start covering them up. Go ahead and do that same thing and you can keep repeating that until you've blocked off all those areas. Now, sometimes they don't look great, but just for the sake of, you can go in here and do a much better job than I have. You might need to add in some other places to make it fill the same. But let's do it over here. Now I'm going to zoom back here, make sure there's not any heavily dark areas that might be a little too dark and again, you can go in here and clean this up all you want on your own time and get this as nice as possible for yourself. I'm just going to go ahead and stick with this. Now that I have cleaned eye patched up those lines that I don't want to see. Make sure you clicked on your texture layer and go to your edit again and go down to instead of define brush preset, defined pattern, charcoal, perfect. I did it. Now let's go over to our demo canvas and see what we've done. Go to your brushes palette. Pick one of these brushes, go over here and it'll already be set to smoothing. Go click on texture now and you'll see that you'll have your textures, should pop up in here, and there's the charcoal one. Now it's time for you, but you don't see it because right over here, under mode, it's sometimes defaults is height. You don't want that, set it to multiply. There you go, and in your scale, sliders is important because that way it can show how large that texture is in that brush. Let's test it out. There you go. Now just before we had the brush, I'll go back down again, show you what we did. This is [inaudible] the define brush preset. If I did that, it would just completely make it solid. You have it like a stamp. But if I did a normal brush, now that I made that pattern, go back up to a brush, go to texture, It got my charcoal on, height when I go back to multiply, and there you go. Now you have that charcoal texture and I can fill in any shape that I want with it. You can see that I still need to do some work on it. There's some dark spots and you can correct that on your own or you can even make your texture a little bit bigger. You can mess up the scale, maybe I want that a little bit bigger so [inaudible] still looks good in whatever I'm working on. But you can go in and fill that in yourself. Some of that just comes from multiplying over itself. But there you have it. You have a repeating pattern brush from your texture that you've made. That's just another way to use it and it comes in very handy when you're filling in large spaces so go and enjoy. 8. PSD: Clipping Masks: Here I have this retro kitchen that I illustrated in Illustrator. I brought it in here as vectors, rasterized it. But to be honest, I probably should have brought this in as layers. That would make the most sense. But I was lazy when I did it and now it's just a flat image. Luckily, there's a high enough contrast in the colors that it's going to be easy to select these and make them their own layers. So not to worry, we'll make this work. Now what I want to do with this illustration is, oftentimes I take my vector illustrations and I want to finish them in Photoshop just because I do still prefer working with textures in Photoshop. It's just a lot easier, a lot more control up, more options. So I still like Illustrator, but if I can, I'll do my textures in Photoshop. So now I want to do some shading, some contouring. I don't want to just drop a texture on an individual element like I did, or like I do on other video. I'm just doing masks. We're going to do clipping masks, that will make our life easy, and I'll show you how it's done. We're going to go ahead and click first on a color. We want to isolate one of the colors so we can work on. Let's say I want to work on this these fridge and these other green elements here. If I wanted just the fridge, if you didn't know, there's this button right here up at the top that says "Contiguous", and if I did that, if I check that, then it's only going to be anything that say this is disconnected from it, so just a section of green is going to be highlighted. If I want all of it, then I'll uncheck that and then everything there will be selected somehow all the green. Now I'm going to hit "Command J" and duplicate those elements on their own layer so you can see that there are separate there. So now we want to texture him. Again, using brushes for more detailed things is a lot better. I made that spray paint texture brush from earlier and I'm going to use it here. I'll go put this on black, what I want to do here before I start drawing straight line here, what I could do is I could start drawing on here or I could select it and sometimes you get lazy and just start filling it in and call it good. But now what happens is if you ever want to change that texture or change the colors and things, now you may have to start over on that layer. So you don't want to destroy that layer, you want to keep that always clean and untouched. So the best way to do that is go to a new layer but before you click on it, hold alt or option, and then you'll see this little menu pops up and you can click here it says use previous layer to create clipping mask. So make sure that's checked and click "Okay". Now you've created your first clipping mask and when you draw enough, you're on there. Now let's do that same thing. But what's neat about this, is I can toggle it on and off and it hasn't touched my original layer. I can delete it, do whatever I want, but it hasn't touched it. That's just super simple, but it will save your life as you're working. So make sure you're using clipping masks. If you want to change the color or things within this, a cool little trick to is using this transparent lock. So you click on it, you have it right here, this little checkerboard. Then go to pick a different color. If you want to switch the color of just that texture without making a new texture, you can just hit "Alt Delete", and it'll fill it in with whatever texture or whatever color that you've chosen which is really, really neat. It's a big time saver, which I always enjoy. So you can do that or you can go in and you can just use a brush again. Now that you have that locked, it's only locking whatever content you have on wherever texture you have. So you can change it there and have a little bit more control. So we've done that. Last thing I'll show you is maybe let's use a different texture here. Maybe you want to have it look a little bit more printed like we've done before. You just want to have things like a texture knocked out of it. But you like the control handles. Actually let's do a different layer. Let's knock out maybe some of these tiles. I'm not going to click on contiguous here, so I can just select coupled tiles. Maybe I'd like to see if I hold shift, it'll continue to keep these, my key, these areas, select multiple areas. So maybe I want to just select a few of those. Now I'm going go ahead and put the Command J on their own layer. What I'm going do is, make the same thing I did earlier, I'm going to hit "Alt" and then click on that, make a new clipping mask and I'm going to take the background texture, is another way to do this. So hit "I", take that background color, and now I have this and now I'm just going to knock out. It'll just be on those ones that I selected. Sometimes you wanted to do some things textured or what not. So go wild. 9. PSD: Texture Masks: Let's say you have an illustration, one element of your illustration on its own layer and you want to apply a texture to it. The easiest way to do that is by using a mask. Its non-destructive, and it's fully editable later. Two very important things that will save you so much time later on down the road as you're working on your illustration. Let me show you how to do it. This happy bear here was a vector smart object that I imported and then I went ahead and rasterized him. I want to apply some textures to him and I have two different kinds I want to apply because they're different for very important reason actually. If I open up this gritty texture, you can see that there's some grays involved. This is important because it's not like this other one which has just whites and blacks. Because in masks, any pixels that are black will be completely knocked out and white pixels will be shown. There's any gray in between there, it'll just be varying levels of opacities. You'll still see there'll be look a lot more complex and won't have that just complete knocked outlook. Depending on what you're going for, if you want that more complex, perhaps even more realistic looking texture, you would have to keep those grays in there. Otherwise you could just knock it out completely, have a cleaner look and knock those out. I'll show you what they both look like. Let's start with the gritty texture. Make sure you're clicking on that layer and it's highlighted, and then hit Command-A, that'll select all. Then Command-C to copy, and then Command-D to deselect. Now, toggle this off. Go down to your happy bear, you should click on him. Then if you go down here at the bottom, you'll be able to add a layer mask. That's what this little icon is. You click on it, it'll pop up a little white canvas. Now hit or hold Option and then click on that canvas. Now you can paste your texture in here. Command-V, pasting that texture. Command-D to deselect. Now watch what happens when I click this little eyeball. Now I can see that that texture is just inside of my bear. The problem is, I don't like how this looks. I don't like that it's basically the inverse of this because I don't want the textures to be very minimal on this and not the other way around. What I want to do is you can go back and alter this. If I just hit Option again and click on here, just hit Command-I, and that'll select the inverse of your image and then go back and see what that does. Now you can see, if I zoom in here, you can see that texture on there. For here, I want to do a color overlay as well so that that texture really show. Let's do. I don't like how that looks because it doesn't look completely knocked out, didn't look very real. But if I do a little bit of an overlay, that'll totally help that out. Let's do a color overlay. That color is fine, maybe a little bit bluer so you could see it. Hit Okay. Awesome. Now that looks a lot more realistic, having a little bit of an overlay, so it's letting that background color show through just a bit. There you have it. There's that gritty texture on there. The cool part about this is if I take this bear and I start moving him around, that texture is going to stay exactly where it is. But if I don't want that, if I want to play around and maybe that texture is very different all around and I want to get a different part of it, I can grab the texture portion and I can move that texture file around within this bear shape. But I'm not destroying it, which is really nice. I can always go back and alter it. I find what I like, perfect, then I can link it back up. Or, I can go back to the bear and I can move the bear around. It's a really handy way to work with textures and not destroying your image that you have to keep saving multiples of it and slowing you down. I wanted to show you the last one. I'm going to take this off. I right-click on there. You can disable it so you can just turn off and see what's going on there or you can just delete the layer completely. I'm going to go back to the charcoal layer. We're going to do exactly what we did earlier. Command-T, why did I hit Command-T? When I said Command-A, I want to select everything, but I'm on my happy bear layer so it's going to copy that. Let's click on the texture and make sure you're on the right one and then hit Command-C. When I get that, turn that off, deselect, go back to my bear, add another mask option, click Command-V. There he is, and let's look, and there you go. Now you can see on this one, there's not those grays in between. It's completely knocked out between, you can see that color all the way through. That's just another look. I don't like it. I don't like that charcoal look necessarily on this for the illustration, but it definitely illustrates my point. I'll show you what that overlay does. It does let you show a little bit of that background. But if I go and add a shape here and I'll add a different color, maybe a pink color. You can see that it's overlaying a bit and it's multiplying a bit over top of it, which is nice. There you have it, masks in Photoshop. Remember, any pixels that are black, they'll be hidden, any white pixels are the ones that'll be shown, super important. But, I hope it helps. 10. AI: Clipping Masks: There are so many ways to use textures in your artwork in Illustrator, and I don't boast to use them all or even know them all. But these are the few that I use on a daily basis when working with Illustrator. Hopefully, if you're a veteran then you're going to pull some things out of this that you've not known before, and I can save you some time. If you're brand new to Illustrator, buckle up, this is going to be fun. We have so many cool little ways to use these textures that you've made. In this poster, it's supposed to be screen printed, so I wanted to keep your vectors and TIFF images to make it easier to color separate, make it easier for the printer. But I also wanted to do some texturing in here because I wanted to make it look a little less computerized. Now, granted it was going to be screen printed, but screen printing is getting so good nowadays that it still looks very computer-generated, even the vectors do. I needed to add a little bit of grunge in there just to make it a tad more interesting, especially when someone came closer up to this artwork. It was a little bit more approachable in general, it didn't look so sterile. That's why I added some misregistration of colors and things. But let's learn about how to use a clipping mask. This is what I do almost every single time I work with textures in Illustrator. This is the method I use. Now, we're going to bring those TIFF textures that we made and now we love. We choose a little eyedropper tool and now we can change the color just like any other vector shape. It's transparent background and we have a small file size which is handy. I'm going to put it right over here, and I'm going to start go along and just shade the edge of this. If I hold option, I can click and drag, and I can make a whole bunch of little line of them, and I can shade this corner. Now, I'm going to show you how to make a brush that does this same thing. If you're going to be doing too many of these. I'm going to copy all this. It'll lag up your computer if you do this too often, but just for this example, or if you're doing like just a small piece, you can get away with doing this. Hit Command-G, to group them all. Then I'm going to grab this. This is the shape I wanted to use like a cookie cutter. I'm going to hit Command-C to copy, and then Command-F to paste in place. You won't see that until you hit Command-Shift right bracket, and now it's on top. Here you go. You can see, there's one on the bottom, one on the top, and then there's your texture. Click on your "Shape", and then you hold "Shift", and click on your "Texture", and then you right-click it all, and make clipping mask. Boom, there you go. It's knocked out. What's cool about this too is, there's a transparent background here. If you want to do something cool, like do the misregistration of color again, but you wanted to do with these textures, it would look really cool. You can multiply it there, and have that look. But you can do that. That's why I kept that one at the very back, so that I could keep that color. But which is neat too, is if I move that over, or if I just wanted to mess with that one, I could make it blue, or you could change whatever color you want back there, and make your life a lot easier. There you have it. That's how I use clipping masks with my TIFF textures, or any other textures, or other shapes. If you want to make your own textures out vectors, you could do that same thing, or if you took images and wanted to put them in here. 11. AI: Bitmap Textures: We've been talking a lot about Photoshop and how awesome it is to work with these textures in there. I want to give a little bit of love to Adobe Illustrator. That's another fantastic program, I love it. People always, ask me, which do you use more, Photoshop or Illustrator? I use them both equally. A lot of times I'll take my vector files, bring them into Photoshop because, it's easier work with some of these textures in there. But, a lot of times too, I like to take those vector files and I don't want to rasterize them into Photoshop file and lose their vector quality and so I want to bring those textures into there. There's two different uses that I have for these textures. When I want to keep it with vectors, there is a way to bring them into Illustrator. It's just a little tricky and it's kind of a walk around. We need to make them into TIFF files and I want to show you how to do that. This spray paint texture I have is a really good example of what we can do with TIFF textures in Illustrator. I'm going to clean this up just like I did the previous textures, and make sure I got just my levels a little bit on enhance that white get rid of some of those grays, a little blacks blacker and the whites whiter. Not too much. You don't have to go as crazy here, for when you're going to make TIFF textures, we're going to bitmap it and you'll see what it does it automatically as a threshold to it, but, let's go ahead and also crop in a bit. Let's move in here, or crop in time yet because, we're going to still bitmap it. Even that out. All right. Crop in, I'm going to zoom in for us a little bit. Now we got image, mode and bitmap. It's okay, we can flatten these layers. You get this little box that pops up and output 300 pixels per inch, it's fine. Make sure it's at 50 percent threshold under the method. Click "OK", and there you go. Now we can crop it even further, because they obviously took away some of that detail out there, which is fine. That's of what we kind of need, so it's not as crazy on the other end, the other end being illustrator. Again, I like to use the eraser tool to make sure there's no edges. That'll make your life a lot easier moving forward. Let's clean up some of those. Okay. Clean that up thoroughly. Now I should be ready to go. I want to go "File", "Save as", and save it as a "TIFF" file and then hit "Save". I don't ever touch these, let's just go ahead. Okay. This is the default. Now that I have that, I'm going to go into an Illustrator file here with the nice little sun, and I'll show you what it looks like to bring in a TIFF texture. Let's go, place, let's bring in my spray paint texture, and there you go. If you zoom in, you'll be able to see a lot of quality. Like it's actually a really fine, grain to that, which is really neat because, you can keep all of that in Illustrator without making it a massive file size. So I want to take this in the cool part, like you said, the cool part like it's only one. Lots of gold bars is all really cool. You can go ahead and adjust the colors on this, which is a really handy tool. It automatically sets it as a transparent background. Let's change this color to, there you go. I'm going to put this on the bomb like copy that command "C" then command "F" to paste in place, then command "Shift" "right bracket" Put that on top. Now I'm just going to grab the top one. Make sure is back on top, I've grabbed the top one, got the texture, right-click. Make a clipping mask, we'll go over this again later, but there you go. Now you can have a really neat, grainy, gradient texture that is super hard to get in any other way. But this way it's nice, it keeps your file sizes down and It's really fun to work with. Enjoy it. 12. AI: Texture Masks: As important as it is to work hard, you also need to work smart. It'll save you money, it will save you time and frustration. All of those things, because there's a 1000 ways to apply textures in Illustrator and there's all these different ways work, but some are better than others and masking is way better than all the others because it is just a nice shortcut that doesn't sacrifice quality. Let me show you how that works. We have our brave shield here. I'm going to go ahead and take the TIFF textures, one of them that we made and I want to apply that texture to this shield. The wrong way to do this, and the lazy man's way to do this would be just to take this, drop it on top of there. I dropped the background and there you have it. But look what happens when you take it off that red background. You have this ugly shape here, that's not clipped to this shape. If you're going to lay this on top of something else, you're going to see a lot of this texture overlap, but also it's not transparent, so you can't do as many options in that graph. For example, if you're going to change the background, you're going to see that nasty color thing. You have to go back and change that. There's lots of different reasons why you wouldn't do that. It's not going to save you time down the road. If you're doing this as a one little thing really fast maybe. But I wouldn't count on it for a big project. Now, here's a vectorised version. Now that you might also think that that's a good idea. Thinking I can just knock that shape, all in this texture out of my shape, by going into the Pathfinder and knocking it out. Well now you've destroyed your shape. It's transparent and it's a lot easier to work with. But now, at least to move this around is like a stamp. But now you have to either go back to manipulate that shape any further or you have to save a copy somewhere. What are we going to do? We're going to add a mask to the shapes. Let's work with a TIFF texture first, we'll do a JPEG as well, which is even easier, but with a TIFF texture, go ahead and click on your artwork and that can be multiple layers, it doesn't matter. Just highlight it all and then click on your Transparency tab and if you need to go window Transparency, if you don't have it, and then go to Make Mask. You won't see anything so don't freak out, it's right here you say Clip, and there it shows up. Now you have two boxes here, this box means you're outside of your clipping mask and so you can click on anything else going on here and you are board. But if you click over here, now you'll notice that you can't click on anything else because you're inside that mask. I'm going to click on this real quick, and then I'm going to highlight, I'm outside. I'm going to click this texture. I'm going to copy it. Now. I'm going to go back in here, I'm going to go inside, and I'm going to Command V and paste that. Now, check out what this is done. I'm going to make that a little bit bigger. There we go. Now, all I have to do is click back to my shape, close this click anywhere outside and check this out. Now you have this shape. You can see that it's transparent. I didn't destroy it. I can take that mask off and will retain all the detail on the main shape of that vector. But if I go out and lay it over here, I can multiply it just as I would anything else, just as if it was knocked out of that texture permanently. That's a super nice way to save you a lot of time and it's non-destructive. Another way you can do it, and let's go ahead and release this. Let's go in here, release that, and see.. Now you can go ahead and grab that texture and your shape remained the same, which is awesome. I'll just actually delete that. Now if you want to try another way to do it is that you can just take a straight JPEG. Make sure it is as black and white as possible. Graze will make a difference. I just had my JPEG file I scanned in and I say that is a JPEG. You can mess up the levels that they didn't Photoshop before you bring it in. But now all I have to do is this, check this out. So I have the shape underneath it. I'm going to lock that background which is command to that'll lock that layer or that item. I'm going to only put that top. I'm going to highlight both of those and then I'm going to go and Transparency and I'm going to hit Make Mask and check that out. Now I have a perfect mask. All the whites were knocked out and then the blacks remained the color that takes from the vector shape behind it. That was a super simple way to work and the cool part about this is if I want to do invert the mask, it'll change the blacks and the whites. It will just flip those, if you wanted it to be fuller or a little bit more sparse on the texture, it has a different look on either one of those. But there you have masks that will be non-destructive, save you tons of time and a really easy to use. 13. AI: Art Brushes: Okay guys. I'm going to be completely transparent with you. Perhaps it's already obvious, you already know. I like Photoshop brushes better than I like Illustrator brushes. Photoshop brushes; I feel like I have more control, it feels a lot more natural when I'm writing with my wake and pen in Photoshop, the way they behave, it feels a little bit more natural to me but illustrator brushes are important too because I get clients a lot that will ask me to create the same textures that they see on the Brave the Woods site, that typically are made in photoshop. They start asking for them as vector files, so they are like, I want exactly that but I want it as a vector file because they're going to use it on either an app, so they're going to need to arrange the elements or they're going to make it a lot bigger than I would typically make my art work. That flexibility of having it be a vector is a huge perk to them and it is honestly a big park to me, if I can get it to look right and I can get to working with it well. I'm going show you how to make brushes in Illustrator out of these textures that we've created. I will start in photoshop and we're going to go through what we've already done before, so just bear with me here. I'm going to make sure that I mess with the levels here, I want to clean it up just a tiny bit. Because we're going to make a tiff texture again to bring it Illustrator and then we'll convert that over and I'll show you how to do that. Let's go to "Filter" or "Select", sorry, "Load selection", background gray, knock that out, hit "Delete". All right, I'm going to make this white, help me out a little bit to see that. Then I'm going to crop in real tight. Don't want any extra art board on here, a little bit more. I'm going to "Bitmap mode" or "Image mode", bitmap, flatten layers, that's okay. All right. So now that we have this, let's go in and save as a tiff file and save this, it's dry brush streaky, perfect. It's exactly what it looks like. Now that I have saved, let's go into Illustrator and let's place that dry brush streaky.tiff. Don't teach me stuff, I'm teaching other people stuff. Every time I do an update, it tends to walk me through tutorial how to use this, which is great the first time but I feel like it keeps popping up. All right. So now that I have my streaky texture here, I'm going to bring it over here in the gray, so I can see something here. Because what I'm going to do, is I'm going to image this. I want these to be vectors, remember. So it's going to make a lot of points. Now this will up the file size because you made a 1000 more points but what it will than just having the straight tiff file that I have here, so it may slow things down. I have found awesome vector brushes that don't do that and I don't know how they did it but it's definitely worth a look and I'll make sure there's a link because I use those brushes frequently. If you go on here, now that you did the image trace, sorry, I think I just walked over that but we did an image trace but you click on this and let's just hit "Expand". We want to isolate this, just the textures, just the black part of the texture. Let's do "Command shift G" and that allows you to ungroup all of these items. I'm going to click on just this white part; "Select", go down to same and fill color. It's now selecting all the white and let's hit "Delete", it will save you a lot of time. Now bring it over here. Now that you have all these separate little artifacts, all these little different vector shapes, we want everything to behave as one and that's what you do when you [inaudible] the object, go down to compound path and that's what that does. It will treat this as one thing. If you do any like colors, if you do any textures within the textures, anything you want to do, it's going to treat it as one and that's what we want. Now we can go to making the brush. If you don't have the brush panel already open, go down to "Window", "Brushes" pops up right there and in the top-right corner, there's a little sandwich nav, you go to "New brush". I don't think it's technically a hammer because it's got four of them but whatever. Okay. So let's go to "New brush", "Art brush". Now these options here, we'll just go from the top to bottom. First, I'm going to name it. What do I call this, dry brush streaky. Then your width is just the width of your texture. Now I like, when I made this, I made it a tall texture, is just early I went and made this brush stroke and that's important I make it tall just because you're going to be using this obviously as a brushstroke, so the taller it is the better, so you want to make something tall and vertical or a narrow. I can go to fixed width or I can go to any of these but pressure is probably the one you're most familiar with when you're using a stylus. I'm not using a stylus, I'm going to keep it at fixed width. I can change that width to make it a little bit smaller if I'd like a little bit thinner, which I probably will. Then for now, I'll show you the difference between these; stretch to fit stroke, this is are two I use but this one right here, stretch to fit stroke length is basically, however long your length of your stroke is, this texture is going to follow and just stretch this exact texture. Then over here, you have this little arrow pointing down for me and using this texture right now, I'm going to do arrow going up. It really depends on what you want to do but for me, how I drew this or how I made this mark was, I whip my dry brush across the paper and the thicker part was up here, so that would be the leading part of my brush and then whatever was left over was right here. I want that when I'm making my strokes, I want this to be the tail end, where it's just getting a little bit streaky like the leftovers of the paint running out of the brush. If you're doing set mouths, you might want to change that. Your method, I could give you a long explanation about which one to use here but just to tense because that will just make it, so that whatever color you choose it will change the color of your brush. Just go tints. Then make sure this over here is set to overlap, just because it'll make a lot of weird, funky things if you don't. Sorry, that's not super technical but do it will work. Now we have our brush, now we hit "B" for our brush to pop-up and we can start drawing. There you go. So you have your own brush. It's a vector brush, which will be super handy. They're actually pretty fun to work with and you can customize them however you want from there but here let me draw, I'm going to move this over here and I'll show you the other thing that you can do with this. Here's this big stroke here. All right. I'm going to highlight that. If you ever want to adjust the brush that you've already made, it'll be right over here in your panels, so just double-click on it and it should pop right back up, hit "Preview" and now you can make your changes and you can see what's going on. You can have that width now, you can see it gets bigger, a lot thinner. Then the difference between this one is so I can do a stretch between guides, so take these two guides, whenever you're basically you're leaving, you can see what's happening here. If I'm pulling this top guide now, it's basically showing the lower I pull this guide down, the more tail into this it's going to show. Like when you're messing with gradients, it does a similar thing. You shut the adjust the sliders and it adjusts what part shows where. If I pull that up, the higher this goes, the more it's going to stretch out this top half and this can be right back to normal if I pull this back. It just depends on what you want but you can see how that plays and then hit "Okay" and it'll say, do you want to apply it to the strokes or you want to leave the strokes where they are and then just apply it to the new ones. I want to apply it to the strokes have already made. That's really neat. All the strokes that you made, can go back and it'll adjust them to what you've done, which is another perk in Illustrator that you don't have in Photoshop. I'm not attacking down about Photoshop because, sorry, Illustrator because Illustrator is an amazing program and I love using Illustrator for certain things but we're just happy to be talking about textures a lot and I do a lot of my texture work in Photoshop. But like I said, when I can get textures to work right and look right in Illustrator, it's a huge advantage because I can use those files and I can expand them a lot bigger and I don't have to worry as much about the pixelization and stuff like that. I do love Illustrator and I do work with textures in Illustrator and you can tune now and you can make your own custom brushes and you make your own tiff textures, all of those things. I hope that helped. 14. AI: Scatter Brush: Sometimes you want just a little bit more control when you're working with your textures. Good way to do that is to work with brushes. I've already taught you how to do an art brush here in Illustrator. Now I'm going to teach you how to do a scatter brush, because we could keep doing this technique where we keep dropping in these and duplicating them until we get that desired edge that we want. But like I said, if you do a too many of those, you're going to increase that file size quite a bit. Then it is going to lag things up. Then I don't want to make this into an art brush and it is scatter brush because the art brush would just stretch this texture and I really want to keep this texture. So let's get it. I'll teach how to use scatter brush. If you click here, I need to trace this image, needs to be a vector shape. There's different ways that trace. If you click right here instead of just right on it, you can figure out the level of detail you want. I'm going to do a high-fidelity because I really want as much of that grainy textures I can. It might take a moment for it to render. But it'll be worth how that turns out because you get a little bit more, otherwise it'll be more of a blob. Here goes. There it is. I'm going to take out that background because I don't want it there, but I have to expand it first. I want to get rid of all that white. Again, I'm at the Command Shift G, to ungroup all of that and then click just on the white. Select same, fill color. All crap, I'm sorry, select same, fill color. Now delete, perfect. I want to make this just a compound paths all the same or just group it, whichever. I want to make this, I'm going to shrink it down a little bit. I want to go my brush pattern, and while it's highlighted brushes, go to top-right, new brush, scatter brush.Alright I'm going to call this a grungy brush. Before I do anything here, click Okay, move this color out of the way. I'm going to get my brush tool. I already know it's showed up right here. This is what you're going to see, draw and align with your brush tool or B. You're going to see that it's actually scattered, I don't want to look like that, so I'm going to go in and double-click. If you want to edit this at all, double-click on your brush and now you have the option to preview it, which is super handy. Now you can figure out what all these sliders are doing and you can experiment. You have size spacing, scatter rotation will go through all of these. Then each of them have all these options here below. Fixed obviously is going to keep it the way it is, and these right here. But if I hit random, you're going to see this slider pop up as an option as well. This is basically like the minimum size and the maximum size variations. Then your centrally randomizing it. Just the minimum size variations and the maximum and then it'll do the spacing. They'll be the same on all. This is minimum, this is maximum. When I go to fixed for the size that's for maybe make it a little bit smaller. Then I want to go to the spacing. That's what I want to make different. I want to shrink this spacing down to almost nothing. It's all there, but now you can see all those pattern, it's basically a pattern repeating there, and I don't want that. Scattering is not going to fix it or random scatter, and I moved it. It's going to just move them all over the place, which is cool for other reasons. I'm going to hit this back to zero, just not for what I want right now. I'm going to do that, fixed. Then rotation, I want them to be random. This is where I can fix that right there. I can make that look a lot more random. There you go. You can mess with these how you want, this just makes a lot more different than just having that repeating pattern. There I have that and make sure on your colorization. I keep forgetting this colorization is the method good at tint or tints and shades. That'll help it, so that you can change the color and then click Okay. Then it gives you the option to apply strokes or leave the strokes where they are. If you have multiple strokes, I'm going to do an applied to that stroke, doesn't matter. Now if I want to go over here to the edge, now I can really do it. Here we go. I'm going to zoom in. I'm going to pick that tool, and I'm going to draw right here at the brush tool. There we go. Now I can, if I write, if I do the. I can change that color to up here. Let's see. Might take a second. Let me double click to make sure that my color just to, maybe it's just tint. Yes, it was just tint not tints and shades. Make a note of that. But I can go in there and I can change that color now, and now it's all random. Then I can go in and do the same thing that I did before with the clipping mass. Put that on top, click on that, and there you go. Now I can clean that up and draw better line if I use my stylus and not my mouse. But you can see I now can get that edge with just one breaststroke as opposed to a million different, a million different textures. Sometimes the scatter brush is the way to go and you can customize and play around with these all you want. I hope that will helped. 15. Save and Organize: You did it. We're here at the end of our texture course, and I'm sure by now you have an amazing collection of brushes and textures. For our final project, we need to organize some of those into a pack of some sort. That could be Photoshop brushes, illustrator brushes, just plain pack of texture overlays, whatever you'd like to do, we need to go ahead and put them into a pack of three or more and create a cover image for it. Now if you are using these things for yourself, which is awesome, and you're using them for your own artwork, the cover art, you might be thinking, why do I have to make the cover? Because it's awesome excuse to make something fun. This is an example here on the screen. This is an example of a brush pack cover image that I created. The brush pack was in collaboration with RetroSupply, Dustin Lee over there. He actually created these brushes themselves. There are different kinds of brushes. They're over here in the top left of the brush tool presets, a little bit more intense on how you make them, the process of making them is a lot harder but the result is incredible. They're are a lot more responsive and behave a lot more like an analog tool that you're mimicking. But anyways the brush pack I wanted to do here, I just want an excuse to draw a cowboy in space. So if you're just using it for yourself, it's a cool opportunity to use the textures, and I wanted you to at least use two of the textures from your pack in the cover image. But if you're going to share these or you're going to sell these, this will come in real handy so you'll thank me later. Either way, do the cover image of a big, awesome excuse to play around with these cool textures that you've made. Now in this last video, I just wanted to go through and teach you a few different things on how to save your textures in your brushes and how to organize them a bit so that you can share or sell them. This is going to be quick and easy. Let's start with the texture pack first. Here in Photoshop, if I have my textures, I want to go ahead and just put them in one file it makes it a lot easier. Just layer that Photoshop file and place your cleaned up textures, I say cleaned up, make sure they're transparent, black, put them on a colored background, make it pop a little bit better, especially if you're going to share these, but just for yourself, it's nice to have them organized into one clean file and I can take that and drag that texture into another Photoshop file if I need and just use this as a reference. It's nice that you can go ahead and name this file. I would probably name this grungy textures or something like that. Then you'd be able to easily access all those textures and see them on a nice plain background. Make sure they are transparent, make sure they are cleaned up, put them on layers and put them into different Photoshop files, which is kind of goes without saying, but the next thing I would say is to make a Photoshop brush or not to make a Photoshop brush, but to save a Photoshop brush. You can see that on my brush presets I have a few here that I've made. I want to save these. Go up to the top right over here or you can go to the bottom, there's this little icon for your preset manager. I'm going to click on that. I'm going to scroll down to the bottom where my textures are, or my brushes are. If I want to click all of these, I can just hold shift and click on all of them and I can save it as a set. I might not want to save it as a set because for example, if I do, you're going to just see it as one file and it's going to be a.ABR file and you can name the file, but you won't know how many textures are in it or you won't know the separate names of each of the brushes in that file that you're going to bring in to Photoshop. If you're sharing it with somebody, make sure you either have some supporting document that says what's going to be in that file before they have to put it on their computer or for yourself, if you just have them saved. It's nice to individually name them. I want to individually name them. I'll just do one as an example. I'll take this charcoal looking one or this charcoal one, and I'll do save set and just do charcoal brush. I'm going to save it to my desktop and it'll be a little.ABR file, which is pretty much it. That's how you save brushes in Photoshop. You'll see it right here on my desktop and I can drag this into the bottom dock, into the Photoshop icon itself and it'll automatically load for my next and it'll always be in my brushes or I can go up here and go down to load brushes. Then I could go and pick wherever that file was and just open it right here and it'll pop up at the bottom of your brush presets. Super simple to use. You can do them as a whole group of brushes as in one file or you can do them separately. Let's do illustrator brushes. We went over art brushes, scatter brushes, they all save the same way, so don't worry about that. I'm going to go into my Brushes Panel now, it'll be right here. But the weird thing about Illustrator is you really just have to save it as an Illustrator file to have the brush. You could do a whole line of them if you wanted to, all different types of them. Then save as Illustrator file because basically as soon as you copy it and paste it into a new file, for example, I'll show you right here. Let's create a new file. You'll notice that it is not in there. It doesn't automatically like in Photoshop, it doesn't keep your brushes stored unless you say so specifically. If I just hit, let me just copy these Command C. I'm going to paste them in here and all of a sudden they show up in my panel in a new document. If you're going to save these, I would go to the top right here and then do save brush library. Then you can go ahead and save that brush. Let's just call it another scratchy smear, so it's a smear brush. I'll save it to my desktop. If I want to save it to my desktop, this will be it so I can find it and I can share it easily and it'll look just like any other AI file. You'll see that right here. When you open it up, you'll just look in your presets and it'll pop up there. I can open one up, so I'm opening up new and you'll see that it automatically loads that brush in there. If you're sharing it with anybody, that's how that would work. Otherwise, if you're going to save this just for your own personal use to make things easier and you want to always have this as an option. You can go into, save it as a brush library, it'll automatically route you to your brushes folder within Illustrator. I did over here, called it scratchy.ai earlier. I'll show you where you can access that. If I had a brand new file, notice how that brush isn't there anymore but I can go into that menu again, open brush library, and go down to user-defined and there should be your brushes. So I have scratchy right there, and then voila, there it is. It pops up and I can click on it over there and get rid of this extra window. Now I can use that brush in another Illustrator file. Just being aware of that if you want to share or sell these would be important. There you have it. That's how you organize, package your textures and brushes. If you want to sell these, I don't necessarily have any advice for selling them. Like I said, when I did these with RetroSupply, he actually sells these on his site and he does all the marketing for these. He has a class called passive income for designers. If you're really interested in selling these and learning more about selling them, checkout that class passive income for designers. But there's how to put this all together. I hope that helped and I hope you enjoyed the class as a whole. It was a lot of fun making these custom textures and hopefully you enjoy making them and using them in your own artwork.