For this tutorial, we will use a few materials!

-Paper (I like using watercolor paper, but this isn't necessary because I use both printer paper and watercolor paper for this tutorial)

-Brushes

-Scanner (or you can just take a picture with your phone)

-Black ink

-Paper towels, napkins, and (optional) parchment paper

-Scissors

-Clear Tape

Method 1: Dry Brush and Paper Towels

1) Use a brush to make strokes on your paper. The drier the brush, the more texture you will have on your textures.

 

2)-3) Using a textured paper towel, you can put ink on it and rub it onto the paper. Like before, the drier the paper the better!

 

4) Rubbing the ink into the paper while twisting it can make interesting patterns!

Method 2: Crumpled up Paper

1) Take a piece of thin paper (copy paper). Tear off a peice of it.

2) Crumple it into a ball with lots of creases.

3) Open it back up

4) Dip it into ink.

5) Crumple it back up again

6) Open it and lay it out flat on a new sheet of paper.

7) Make more textures

8) Cut them out into small squares

9) Place them apart on paper and use clear tape to hold them in place

Method 3: Parchment Paper

Ink dries slower on parchment paper, so if you apply the same method as you did with the paper towls on parchment, you can get some very unique shapes!

 

Just crumple it up, dip it in ink, and apply it on white paper and you have some cool shapes!

Scanning

After you scan your images, they should have some crumples on them. To get rid of it, I suggest this method:

1) Scan you images and go to EDIT->TONAL CORRECTION->BINARIZATION

2) You can adjust the black and white contrast

3) If you have some artifacts left, simply use the ERASER tool to get rid of them

 

IMPORTANT NOTE

Before you save these as brushes, make sure to change the LAYER from COLOR to MONOCHROME. Click the BLACK icon to only show black.

 

Then turn off the background layer and save as a PNG with NO BACKGROUND.

 

Reopen the PNG and it should have no white left. Change the LAYER from COLOR to GREY. Then save your brushes. I like using watery based brushes.

 

Brushes Made Using This Tutorial

In Color