Now you have your design ready and you have used the cool Photoshop actions and brushes from my previous posts, but there’s something lacking. You notice your design’s background is blah and your design looks flat as a pancake. Well help is on the way. A texture and a pattern can put the pep back into your design’s step. I think I hear a faint voice asking what is a texture, what is a pattern, what is the meaning of life? That last question is a hard one, so I’ll stick to answering the first two.

A texture in this case is an image with a dominant theme, such as a forest of trees, clouds, or a cluster of stones. It can also be an image that showcases a surface, such as stucco, burlap, concrete, or silk. Basically, anything can be a texture now. The peeling wood siding on your house could be a texture. Next time you see it, you better take a picture of it, because that is one of the best texture shots nowadays. Textures are best used as a background or blended into the foreground of the design. One thing I know for sure is that textures can add just the right amount of drama to a design. In the digital art world, drama is always a good thing.

Now onto patterns, a pattern in Photoshop terminology is a design or image that can be seamlessly tiled together. Some of the patterns look repetitive while others look like one continuous image. Some patterns look like smaller versions of regular images and others look like abstract designs. Patterns can be used the same way as textures, but patterns are apart of Photoshop and they can be added to it too and accessed in a variety of ways in the program. You can fill a selection with a pattern and you can add a pattern to a layer by using blending options and the pattern overlay option. I say find a pattern you like and go crazy with it!

Huh, you don’t know of any good places to find textures and patterns? Well, let me help you with that. Let’s go on a little shopping trip. We’re going to Photoshop Fashion World. If you look on the left aisle, you’ll see some tantalizing textures and if you look to the right, you’ll see some preppy patterns. Let’s check out the textures first. Here’s some textures that I think are so in for the Fall season:

Image*After

Brush Fantastic

Free4Photoshop

Free Seamless Textures

Free Textures.Org

Blog.SpoonGraphics

CG Textures

Digital Artist Toolbox

TextureZ.com

Trimoon’s Blog

TexturePacks.net

TextureKing

Texturebits

Paxton Prints

Now lets go to the right aisle and see what groovy patterns we can find:

Free4Photoshop

Graphicxtras

ChainStyle

Free Photoshop Patterns

DesignerPie

Cybia

Whew! That was one heck of a shopping trip! lol I hope you all found some cool goodies you can use in your designs. If any of you want to take us on another shopping trip to show us some other textures or patterns that are in this season too, then let us know about it. My parents just walked in, they want to know why I went on another extravagant shopping trip. I think I better get going while the going is good. lol Remember, tomorrow I am going to talk about Photoshop styles and gradients. They’re so hot that they’ll make you strike a pose. Leave my textures alone Mom! Stay beautiful and stay away from the shopping police!

The Photoshop addict is outta here! Peace!

- Denesia