Wednesday WarmUp Texture Brushes

Welcome!

For the past few weeks, this blog has hosted “Wednesday Warm Up,”— a day of usually quick drawing, inking, brushing as warm up to our serious art. I share a strategy to try each Wednesday using the iPad app ProCreate. I only use the brushes in the app— and this week’s focus is on TEXTURE.

This Week

This week we’ll look at another way to spend some warm up time— creating your own texture brushes. First we’ll see how to set them up and what they do, and then we’ll see how to create our own.

The Process

The video below explains the process of creating textured layers and textures brushes. Here’s a quick summary:

Texture Layers

• Choose a texture brush, like “Clay” in Organic Brushes
• On a new layer, brush a medium grey color in one continuous stroke with the clay brush. Update: A Skillshare teacher, Jennifer Nichols, indicated this “grey” layer did not print out well. So, I’ve been choosing a very light–towards white– of the dominant hue in my picture.
• Set the blend mode to “color burn” and adjust opacity to your taste.
• Repeat the process in a layer below with these additional actions:
  • Set the blend mode to Linear Burn
  • Rotate the layer 90° to get an even effect
• Group these layers above your art work.

Texture Brush

• Choose a texture brush, like “Clay” in Organic Brushes — this way it will have most of the other settings already.
• Slide left to choose “Duplicate” so you keep the original brush.
• Tap the duplicated brush to open settings.
• Choose “Shape,” “Edit,” “Import,” “Source Library”
• From the source library choose the shape of your brush to fit the texture you want [streaky, blotchy, smooth, etc.]
• Be sure to click “Done”
• Choose “Grain,” “Edit,” “Import,” “Source Library”
• From the source library, choose the “paint roller texture effect” you’d like– a rough paper, an even application, a blotchy effect
• Be sure to click “Done”
• Click Done.

A Why and How Video

Try it!

Go ahead try it. Watch my practice video with brief explanations. Be sure to add any suggestions or ask questions here if it’s not clear, and please remember to share #warmup4art .