Fake Real Texture Tutorial (by Vered)

NOTE: This tutorial is suitable for Photoshop 7 and above only. Also, this tutorial assumes you understand Photoshop layers, blending, brush usage and the location of photoshop tools. And final point - this is a very ... general explanation. A lot of what you have to do will be based on your own creativity, but this is more like a tips tutorial.

1. We start with some preliminary stuff. For the purpose of this tutorial I created a set of sketching/painting/drawing brushes. I defined various PS brush presets. These brushes are not for stamping mostly. They are for drawing. Each brush has a name and a number and I will refer to some of these numbers during the tutorial.

The names & numbers of the brushes.

The best view for these brushes is in "stroke" mode. To do this, open the brush pallette menu by clicking the tiny arrow on the right (circled in red) and choose "Stroke Thumbnail":

And this is how the stroked brushes look like:

And this is what each brush can actually do:

(To view the brush name and number choose "Text Only" from the brush menu)

2. And now we start creating our texture by opening a new image and giving it some basic colour:

3. Using the brushes add some drawing on the basic image with various colours:

4. Then go to the "Filter" menu => "Blur" => "Gausian Blur" (make sure the radius is not too small yet not too big):

5. Find the polygonal lasso (click the lower right corner of the tool- circled):

6. Create an uneven jagged shape with the polygonal lasso by clicking many points while you create you selection:

7. Just to explain what I maen by jagged, I stroked the selection so you will see... The idea is to make the shape jagged, but it cannot have sharp points:

8. Add a new layer and when you are in that new layer, fill the jagged selection with a colour of your choice and then blend it. I chose soft light here, but it's all up to your imagination:

9. Now create another shape, add a new layer, fill the shape with a different colour and blend it again. Keep doing this a number of times until you get something like this:

10. Now go to the "Filter" menu => "Noise" => "Add Noise" and add very mild, monochromatic noise:

11. Now another thing you can do is to select jagged bits from your image and rotae them and blend them somewhere within the image - so just create a new jagged selection like I explained above. It's best if it contains some part of the stripes you added before:

12. Go to the "Edit" menu => "Copy Merged", then click CTRL+V to paste the merged selection. Now using the arrow tool move the selection you just pasted elsewhere... (unless you move it, you won't see it):

13. Now just rotate it, move it and then blend it once you have decided where you want it to be:

14. Repeat the process a few times with a few more merged selections from the image until you are satisfied:

15. Now we can add some splatters. This will be hard for me to explain but basically to add splatters you need to stamp with the splatter brush (brush no. 9) a few times on the same place or paint while hardly moving from the same spot. You need to play with this brush a bit to get the 'feel' for it. You can also enhance the splatter using brushes number 3 & 12.

Now here's a quick explanation on how you can achieve this:

Also, please note that brush 12 and brush 13 have special flow settings (you can view them in the brush name). To change flow you need to go to the brush tool settings:

After all this - here's the added splatters to our piece:

Just a reminder that you add the splatters on a new layer and afterwards you can blend them - I chose soft light for my blending:

16. Now comes the fun part. Add a new layer, and pick a sketch brush - I'd start with no.1. Start scribbling within the picture - I try to stick to the lines of the shapes and every now and then stray elsewhere:

17. You can either blend the layer or, as in the following image, just change the opacity:

18. Add another layer and sketch some more, all the while changing brush colours. Stick to brushes no. 1, 3, & 6. Add as many sketch layers as you feel are needed. It's best to use as many layers as possible, even for one single scribble, so you can give each layer it's most fitting blending mode:

19. Now make some more jagged selections, use copy merged to select them and rotate and blend them:

20. Add a new layer and with bush 11, paint a bit:

21. Now blend the pain into the picture (here with soft light):

22. Add another layer and paint on it with another rougher brush - this time I used no. 4:

23. Blend it in (here with overlay):

24. Keep on adding layers of brushes and sketches:

25. Add more splatters too and here you have a final result:

Now, all the above is of course just one way of doing this, but it gives you the tools and methods from which you can develop a very very long way.

Tutorial by Vered