Home Tutorials The Easy Way to Add Bold Textures to Your Illustrations in Photoshop

The Easy Way to Add Bold Textures to Your Illustrations in Photoshop

Friendly Notice: If you dig this tutorials you'll probably really love the Brave the Woods Summer Tour. Brave the Woods is travelling across the US teaching live workshops. It's fun, unintimidating, and you get so much free stuff in the workshop it's practically free.

Over the past few weeks I've been working on a new brush pack with Brad Woodard of Brave the Woods.

The brush pack is a collection of extremely bold textures to add to your illustrations. It reminds me of the stuff you might find in an Eric Carle or Charlie Harper's work.

One night when we were pulling all the random elements from the pack together (and discussing our love of cereal, the comedian Mitch Hedberg, and bug puns) Brad was trying out the brushes and showed me some sweet tricks for adding clipping masks and changing colors fast.

I was so excited by this faster way of doing this I asked him if he'd make a video I could share with you. Enjoy!

Brave the Woods Summer Tour

Brave the Woods is currently on tour doing workshops across the country about using textures and making bugs. How cool is that!

Learn more about the Brave the Woods Summer Workshop Tour

If you live near any of the following areas I highly recommend you signup for the workshop:

Minneapolis, MN (June 6th, 2018)
Madison, WI (June 7th, 2018)
Metro Detroit, MI (June 13th, 2018)
Grand Rapids, MI (June 14th, 2018)
Columbus, OH (June 19th, 2018)
Indianapolis, IN (June 20th, 2018)
Chicago, IL (June 22nd, 2018)

Comments

Rene

OMG I didn’t know how to make a layer mask in PS. Thank youuuu!

June 19, 2018

Belinda

I can only speak for myself, but I prefer Photoshop over Illustrator. I create educational packs for kids that include coloring pages. Things like that are def easier, quicker, and all around more feasible to create in Illustrator. However, I get much more enjoyment from doing digital artwork with the various customization options Photoshop offers. I prefer the ease of Photoshop’s layers, the painterly look that is as good as you are an artist, and the ease of working with textures as seen above. If you dig using shapes you can also do that in PS with the vector or selection tools.

The closest thing that I’ve found to something like that in Illustrator is by using/creating custom brushes (I already do that) and the image trace option (meh). All of that is by no means bad, It just doesn’t produce the look that I most desire.

To each his own, it seems.

June 08, 2018

Amber Benton

Hey, guys! Just received this tutorial in the newsletter and am star struck. I’m always torn between AI and PS – I use them both but lean more to AI. But you guys keep bringing me back to PS more and more frequently! Love it – thanks for sharing!!!

June 04, 2018

chris

Why would you create an illustration in photoshop and not Illustrator?

June 04, 2018

Therese Scheller

That was super cool. Too bad I just saw the workshops you are doing because Mpls is sold out – wahhhhhh!

June 01, 2018

Rebekah Love Dorris

I know anything from both RSCO & Brave the Woods is gonna be cool! One bad question: what does that translate to for PC? Control and Alt? And then Alt delete to fill?

Thanks so much for the shortcut! And those new brushes look way cool :D

June 01, 2018

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