In this tutorial I will share four ways of introducing texture into your work. Whether it is to sell realism or as a final flourish, artwork can be greatly improved with the introduction of a little texture.

1. Brush settings

This one is the most straight forward. By clicking the toolbar icon on your preferred brush, (one that is opaque and hard works best) you can go to the texture settings of the brush and customize the underlaying texture. At first your texture may look very soft, so what I like to do is switch on "emphasize density" and change the mode to apply texture to "multiply".

I like using this setting when I know that I'm going to need a certain texture from the beginning. By utilizing the different options you can mimic canvas, or even oil paint like in this study of mine of J.C. Leyendecker's "Independence Day":

Try to layer and vary your colors to add a bit more of a "grainy"feel if that's what you are going for.

2. Using a blender, or an overlay brush

This works best if you have already laid out your painting and would like to then add the texture. You can do one of two things, use a blender to smudge the texture or open a new layer and apply it on top. My favorite blender is this one:

It's called "Mirre's textured blender". I am recently also liking the default "wet bleed blender" under the watercolor brush options. When you're using the blender try to minimize your strokes or else it will look overworked.

The other way you can apply texture is to overlay it on top. Start by laying down your desired colors, and make sure they are blended already. Then create a new layer, set it to multiply and lower the opacity down to your liking. What brush you use is up to your imagination, the ones I most frequently use are the "running color spray" or the "tone scraping" under the Airbrush options. However, in one of the examples I used a brush asset from a star constellation pack XD so believe me you can use anything!

The method is simple, once you have your layer set just pick the darkest shade and sweep softly, you can pick any color you like though. Additionally, with Airbrush or Decoration brushes you can change your mode to "erase" this helps you customize your texture some more.

Most frequently I use this technique to make skin look more realistic and show the pores.. However, you can use this in enviromental pieces as well, to give the appearance of tiny particles.

To try to mimic the appearance of poppy flowers from a distance, I used the running color spray the same way I showed you above. The only difference is implementing the lasso tool.

3. The lasso tool; quick stamping

The reason I call this quick stamping is because you are essentially creating a "stamp" or a custom shape with the lasso tool. You start by having laid your base colors with some shading already.

Then simply hold shift and create some shapes! To subtract hold alt. Once you have the shape you like, fill in with your desired textured brush sparingly (don't fill it in all the way, defeats the point). In nature you usually see trianglular shapes (mimics leaves, grass, flowers, bushes) so keep that in mind when creating your selection. You dont have to set your top layer to multiply in cases where you need the texture brighter than the background.

Ok, so the product we get is this one above. Not bad, from far away it looks like flowers! But chances are viewers are going to be seeing this up close so you need to incorporate it more into the background. To do this do some blending, blurring, and soft erasing (kneaded eraser is best) to edit your shape. At the end it should look more incorporated.

Now all you have to do is repeat the process until you get the right feel. Unfortunetely, this alone can't stand by itself because it lacks opaque defined shapes. You're either going to have to paint them in or use an actual stamping tool to do this. Luckily, Csp has a variety of stamping brushes you can use in default. As well as a massive database of assets you can download for free. This tutorial doesn't cover stamping, but let me know if that is something you would like to be expanded upon.

4. Overlaying a textured image

So say you have a finished illustration, but you want to add some type of texture over the top to make it more visually engaging. This is very similar to overlaying a brush texture mentioned before except you are using an image texture. Before we get into this I would like to warn you about simply googling "textures" and copy, pasting it. Copyright laws may exist over these images and you do not want to get mixed up in that. Try looking for texture packs that are listed as free or take your own pictures of pretty textures you see.

To turn pictures you have taken into usable textures we'll have to go through a few steps. Also remember the better quality the image the better the texture overall. I took this picture with my phone camera so this isn't gonna go well with exceptionally large illustrations, but we can make it work for our case. First open up the image in csp, and press ctrl+u, summoning the HLS slider and completely desaturate the image (alternatively click edit> tonal correction> hue/ luminosity/ saturation) Next, click edit> tonal correction> tone curve. We need to amp up the contrast, but also keep the image light overall. Fiddle with the curve until you get it.

Next open up the illustration you want the texture on. Then simply paste the texture on top in a separate layer. Resize the texture if needed. Set the layer to multiply and lower the opacity and there you are!

If you don't like how the texture is darkening the image you can go back to Edit> tonal correction> gradient map. This opens up a window that alows you to change the hue of the texture, if you pick a color close to the image it will lighten.

Well, thats pretty much the method. You can play around with layer modes to your liking to give it different effects. If you use this in combination with the techniques shown above you can dramatically change your image into something more visually engaging. Thank you for reading this tutorial and I hope it helped in at least some small way!