Texture #04
One of the things I enjoy doing is making textures. There are lots of ways to make textures digitally but I like using ink on paper to make my textures and then I scan them in to use them digitally. Straight digital color can be a little bit bland so it’s nice to be able to add some texture to the color. A lot of other people believe the same thing and you can see lots of textures in digital works these days and going back twenty years. If you are an artist and have spent any time online you’d see ads from people who want to sell you the textures they’ve made. It looks like a pretty good business by the amounts of adds I receive.
Over the last few years I’ve filled three sketchbooks with textures plus one with textured brush strokes. They’re five by seven inch books. Of the three texture books one has 32 pages and the other two have 42 pages. I’ve filled all three up, front and back, with ink textures that I drew. That is a lot of pages of textures.
The first book I made on the twenty third and twenty fourth of August back in 2023. The second I made on the twenty seventh and twenty eighth of April back in 2024. The third is from December 31, 2024 to January 2, 2025. So it has been over a year since I made any texture books.
I hadn’t even planned on making any more textures. Two hundred and thirty two pages of textures seems like enough. Except that on Thursday of this week I, all of a sudden, got it into my head to make some new textures. Though this time I wanted to do them a little bit different. I decided to up the size.
As I mentioned before the size of the sketchbook that I worked with for the other ones was five by seven inches. For this one I wanted to go up to nine by twelve inches. Or at least that’s the size I settled on. I have been using Strathmore Multi-Media sketchbooks for these and nine by twelve was the only other size they had of those. I work at that size for drawing all the time so it would do.
Texture #08
The main thing that I use to make these textures are brushes. I was using four different ones today. But then I also try to go out of the box and see what other things I have around that can make textures. I’m willing to try out anything but not everything is up to the task.
The first brush I used was a big bamboo Japanese calligraphy brush. I didn’t bring it to a smooth point as if I was making calligraphy but instead smashed the point down so that the brush spread out and became many points. Whenever I moved the brush across the page it left behind a bunch of ink trails. It’s those trails that I used to make the textures. I also had a smaller bamboo brush that I used.
I also used this half inch wide round bristle brush. Being that it was made of stiff bristle it was less versatile. I couldn’t mash in into any shapes because the bristle was stiff, straight, and staying that was. With a light touch I could lay down some thin parallel lines but a heavier touch lead to a solid black ink mark. I had to keep the touch light.
The fourth brush that I used I think I liked the best. I also think that I didn’t use it in any of the other three books. A fan brush. That’s a flat brush that’s shaped like a small hand fan that you wave at yourself to keep cool. It’s probably about an inch and a half wide. Since fan brushes don’t have a ton of bristles to them nor much of an ink reservoir I was hesitant to use it. But it ended up working great.
What was so good about the fan brush was that it consistently laid down a lot of parallel lines. It was much more ordered than the smashed down bamboo brush. I’m all for creating textures with a little bit of chaos but a bit of order worked well too.
Texture #12
One of the ways of making textures that I like best is to make them with splatter. There are a bunch of ways to do this but the one I like best is to dip a brush in ink and then tap the handle (with your hand or another brush) to splatter little drops on ink onto the paper. It takes a bit of time and is messy but I like the results.
Speaking of messy I had to take extra measures when making textures. I put brown paper all over my drawing table to keep the ink from splattering all over it. I used some brown paper that came as stuffing in a package. I also stuck an eleven by seventeen piece of paper under the piece I was working on in the sketchbook. That way the other pages in the sketchbook won’t get ink on them. That ink can really fly around when making textures.
One of the other things I used was a small piece of plastic foam. It was also part of packaging. It was used to stiffen up an iPad case during shipping. I cut out somewhere around a three by four inch piece of it and brushed ink onto one side of it. Then I dabbed the foam onto the paper. I found it worked best when I put a loop of tape on the back of the foam to put my finger through.
I also used a piece of crumpled stiff plastic paper. I think it was part of a wrapper of something. I found it out in the garage and it was just a piece of litter that I found in the yard and meant to throw away. I brushed ink onto one side of it and dabbed at the paper. It did a good job.
I even tried a cotton ball for a page. It did okay.
One last thing I used was the edge of a stiff baseball card size piece of paper. I inked up the edge and drew shapes with it. That worked okay too.
So far I’ve filled up 35 pages with textures. Since the book is nine by twelve inches it takes a bit longer to make the textures but I’m having fun working at that size. With the small size I move the brush with my wrist but at this larger size there is a lot more shoulder movement. I can’t wait to see what other textures I can come up with.