Article: Creating Background Textures
by Meryl Bartho

DO YOU HAVE YOUR OWN, UNIQUE SET OF TEXTURES?
By Meryl Bartho © Meryl Bartho Dec, 2004
Written with an Adobe Photoshop “bias” but applicable to all programs.

Texture is such an important part of digital scrapbooking; do you have your own collection of textures? Photoshop has a lovely collection but to make unique pages why not get your own collection together?

First off – set up a place to store them. Go to your file manager and create a folder labeled textures – then start filling it

First, look through your own photos you have stored – any of grass? landscapes? garden photos? often photos, or parts of photos, which are not good enough to scrap are wonderful for textures, its amazing how many we have in our own collections.

Next, look around you and see what you can see to photograph, with digital cameras it’s so cheap, so easy, just snap away, download & store. If you don’t have a camera, but do have a scanner, many of these can be scanned too.

Some good sources I found:
A wall which is sadly in need of a repaint
An area of wall which gets little sun, a bit moss has grown here
A garden wall with lichen
The barks of several trees
Several fabrics – clothing, fabrics, household linens……….. the list here is endless
Papers – blotting paper, brown craft paper, a piece of handmade
The “marble” cladding on our local shopping centre
Some dry, cracked earth
A piece of flat copper, with verdigris
The possibility are endless – some you can photograph in “normal mode, others you may want a close up – macro, or super macro made, but just take them whatever your camera can do! Once you start looking you will become so much more aware of the textures around you.

Two websites which have many textures waiting for the taking are http://textures.forrest.cz/ & http://www.mayang.com/textures/ - but remember, although downloading from a website is quick & easy, these then are not your own, unique ones :0)

Right now that you have a folder full of textures – what do you do with them? The filter menu in Photoshop recognizes psd files, so open each of your pictures in Photoshop SAVE AS > PSD in your textures file, then they are ready to use to add texture to whatever you like – just choose FILTER > TEXTURE > TEXTURISER.. When the screen opens up, you will see TEXTURISER with the drop down of defaults – brick, canvas, burlap etc and to the right of this a little right pointing arrow. Click this, then click “Load Texture” which will appear, then browse to the folder where you stored you texture picture or scan & load it. And apply this texture to whatever you like.

Have fun!

Two examples of where I’ve used photos & scans to texturize backgrounds are below: