Hello and welcome to my first post, this post was inspired by another post on another blog that I was reading a few weeks ago but I can’t find the resource at the moment but when I do I will post it.

Ok this is kind of a tutorial or technique that can be applied to anything creative or graphical I guess. It’s all about creating textures, I know that there are many resources on the net to find textures but the fun in creating your own far out weighs the easy option and it also gets you away from your computer.

Let start, this is where you let your creativity go, find your self some paper, fabric or grab a camera to take a picture of anything you think would create a great texture. I’ll let you know what I did…

I got some copier paper, my sons water paints and a few other things I could get my hands on and created some of these textures right here…

Water colour wash

Wax candle then water colour wash

Water colour splats with a toothbrush

Used tea bag thrown at paper… don’t ask!

Used tea bag dipped in water paint then thrown at the paper… again don’t ask!

Hand full of grass, yes grass from the lawn… it was getting long! Smeared and dragged across the paper and then the paper was scrunched up and flattened out again.

Now you’ve got your textures scan them in quite high res, these were A4 pages scaned at 300dpi you can go higher if you need to, the more detail the better but you’ll need the processing power to handle it.

This is were you can give your design a lift, lets take a cover design or web page background with a gradient going from top to bottom.

Open photoshop and create a new document like so…

Double click the gradient tool to bring up the gradient editor and change
the stop colours to create a subtle gradient.

Click and drag on your background layer, top to bottom or bottom to top, doesn’t really matter

Open your scanned texture and copy it, then go back to your original document and paste it on top of the gradient you just created.

Set the layer blend mode to ‘overlay’

Up to the menu bar Image > Adjustment > Hue/Saturation and reduce the saturation to -100%

On the layers pallette click ‘Layer mask’ to create a layer mask on your texture layer, ensure that your layer mask is selected.

Click on the gradient tool and then click the edit gradient bar.

Make sure you have black to white set up or as below.

Select radial gradient in the menu bar, click near the top left of the image and drag down to the bottom right. The black area of your mask should hide your layer and the bottom layer should be revealed as shown.

Vola! Now you have your background you can get on and design your content how ever you like see below for an example.

This is just one example of creating a your own texture background, there are many parameter to explore and experiment with but hopefully this is a good guide as to how to get you started.