Introduction: Creating Textures and Patterns

This article covers different methods of creating textures. Textures give a sense of depth to everything we see. Look around you for a moment, you’ll see that your walls, floors, furniture even your keyboard, are all textured and that gives them a sense of what it would be like to touch them just by looking at them.

These days everyone is using textures to create wonderful designs. Some like to call this style “grunge” and say this style shows a lack of skill. The truth to the matter is that to create good textures you have to have a good eye and good sense of color and it really requires a good deal of skill to make it believable and work in a design.

There are different ways to achieve these textures: with a camera (go and take a picture of the texture you like a bring that to Photoshop), or a scan (for example scan a piece of old paper) and the other way is do it totally with Photoshop.

1. Creating a Tile

Okay, lets get our hands dirty and open a New File in Photoshop (Ctrl+N). In the name field put “tile texture”, although you can name it whatever you want. For Width put 500 pixels and the same for height.

Leave resolution default (72 pixels/per inch) and leave the Mode as "transparent". Now click “OK”.

Fill the canvas with any color (I used #50160B) you like, remember everything is up to you this time. Add a little noise to the fill (Filter>Noise>Add Noise) with these settings:

Amount 3%
Distribution Uniform Selected
Monochromatic Selected

See how the noise already gives the sense of more detail to our canvas?

Still, we need a little more detail so lets select Filter>Sharpen to apply more detail to our image.

Now we need to make this texture usable by making it into a pattern. To create a pattern out of our texture simply go to Image > Canvas Size and change the size to 50 width and 50 height. More complex textures may requiere further adjustments to make it tile correctly, but in this case this is sufficient.

2. Results

Bingo, we got our tileable texture in a few steps.