2B D29 : My Very Own Textures

I feel like Kim gave me the keys to the Kingdom with this lesson!  The whole world has opened wide with the knowledge of how to build textures.    I've been a big texture lover for years ...  I've got a hard drive full of wonderful texture pictures, but I never quite knew how to go from raw textures to the beautiful abstract textures that can effectively be layered into a photo ...  until now!

Now I know the secrets!  I'm so excited!  Just when I find I'm running out of space on my hard drive.  Doh!  I'm also learning that these layered texture files can grow into whopping big files in a hurry.

I've decided to name the textures in this set after some of the beloved characters in ABC's Once Upon a Time.  Mary Margaret, Charming, Henry and Emma.

The Bird Brush came from sd_stock here at Deviant Art.

Don't worry-- There are many more characters on the show who need textures.  Including the Villains.  More to come!

Here are some of the base textures I started with on my texture walk in downtown Oshkosh a few weeks ago :

 
A few more thoughts on this exercise :  It seems I would get one of the textures "just right" and then by the time I exported it, and smallified it, something changed.  It just didn't look quite like I had worked up.  Sometimes it made the softer parts rougher, or the lighter parts darker.  Finally, I just gave up.  This is what I ended up with.

Of course the real test will be to actually layer these into some "real" photos.  I'll leave that for a separate post. 

Although I can't share Kim's basic recipes for creating great textures (Sign up for the class and you'll learn the secrets!), I will share Lost and Taken's Tutorial for How to Create Subtle Grunge Textures which shows a similar process.