Graphic Content:
Creating a Hand Drawn Texture

By Christopher "shaithis" Buecheler

This will make a mediocre wood grain look a lot better. For now though, I've decided I want the image to be 128 pixels high, and 256 pixels wide. Right now it's not. Let's fix this problem.

Stretching the image to 256x128 will again compress the HSB noise affect, now with shadows and hilights, which will in turn help the realism of the wood grain.

Now we have our image (at 200x zoom). I offset it 64 pixels down and 128 to the right, and a troublesome seam has shown up. Time to get rid of it. Here I'm copying a piece of the wood...

... and placing it over the seam. Now we've created two seems. Kinda seems like we're moving backwards, eh? Trust me for a minute. This is a technique I use when the clone tool would be annoying. :)

I'm rotating the pasted piece by 180 degrees, so it's not as obvious that its been cut from another area of the texture.

The flipping also (by lucky coincidence) helped the texture to blend in a bit better. Now all we have to do is...

Use the erasing tool to gradually let areas of the sub-texture show through, creating seamless blends. Neat, huh?

Now merge the pasted layer with the regular layer, and we have our base wood. Again, still not as realistic as a photo-base texture (creating something that was would be very time consuming), but not bad. We're going to be adding patterns and whatnot next week, which will make this texture look even better (trust me).

Here's the texture at its normal 256x128 size, just for reference.

Next week's project is to take that texture, and turn it into a nifty trim. It's actually a very quick process, if you have a tablet available (or even if not, but it may be hard to accomplish certain effects).

Until Then,

-Christopher

- Christopher Buecheler is a freelance 2D artist.